1. No category

Winter 2001
Teacher Network
Teachers on Standards
COVER PHOTO
COURTESY OF
EDWARD BROWN
Raising the Bar with
High Stakes Tests
What Is Good Writing?
Standard Deviation
Strengthening Best
Practices in South
Carolina
Integrating Standards
and Culturally Relevant
Course Content
A Publication of the Bread Loaf School of English
Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont
Plus more stories on
standards from
teachers in the Bread
Loaf Teacher Network
Winter 2001
Table of Contents
Teacher Network
Winter 2001
A Call to Action: Standards in Alaska .................................................... 6
by Scott Christian
Mandating standards raises hot-button policy issues for all Alaskan communities, and coordinating stakeholders’ interest will be critical for success.
Editor
Chris Benson
[email protected]
BLTN: Strengthening Best Practices in South Carolina ...................... 9
by Diane Crenshaw
Address correspondence to Chris Benson,
Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT 05753.
The Bread Loaf School of English publishes the Bread Loaf Teacher Network
Magazine twice a year.
Raising the Bar with High Stakes Tests ................................................ 12
by Hugh Dyment
Director of BLTN
and the Bread Loaf School of English
James Maddox
Coordinator
Dixie Goswami
Student test scores cannot give a complete picture of teacher accountability.
This veteran teacher examines three fair accountability programs and finds
them complementary to her first year of study at Bread Loaf.
A teacher at an alternative school welcomes the challenge posed by the High
School Graduation Qualifying Exam in Alaska.
Excellence for All and from All:
A Look at Standards in One Inclusion Classroom ............................. 15
by Lorrie Jackson
This Ohio teacher explains how to set and achieve writing standards in a classroom including varied student levels of ability.
Bread Loaf Office Staff
Elaine Lathrop
Sandy LeGault
Dianne Baroz
Judy Jessup
Karina: A Personal Perspective on High Stakes
Standards and Growth ........................................................................... 18
by Tom McKenna
Faculty Consultants
JoBeth Allen
Courtney Cazden
Tharon Howard
Andrea Lunsford
Carol MacVey
Beverly Moss
Jacqueline Royster
Of Bombs, Blackness, and Beautiful Music .......................................... 21
by Will Marinell, with Lou Bernieri
Director of Telecommunications
Rocky Gooch
[email protected]
Technical Consultant
Caroline Eisner
Administrative Associate
to the Coordinator
Carolyn Benson
Documentation Consultants
Scott Christian
Eva Gold, Research for Action
Teacher Research Consultant
Bette Davis
Copyright 2001
Bread Loaf School of English
http://www.blse.middlebury.edu/
No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission of the editor.
A writing teacher discovers the “language of standards” falls short of describing an important moment in a student’s intellectual growth.
Is there a place for electronic writing exchanges in schools? A poetry exchange
between students in Massachusetts and Kenya finds a cross-cultural niche.
What Is Good Writing? Standard Deviation ....................................... 24
by Jason B. Leclaire
Students’ performance on high stakes testing does not always reflect their
ability. What one teacher did to ensure his students met the challenge.
Listening to Voices: Integrating Standards
and Culturally Relevant Content .......................................................... 26
by Maria Offer
By listening to elders’ and students’ suggestions, a teacher in a Native Alaskan
village integrates state curriculum standards with culturally relevant content.
A Teamwork Approach to Implementing Curriculum
Standards and School Reform ............................................................... 30
by Patricia C. Watson
Kentucky’s school reform movement, now a decade old, continues to find new,
innovative ways to improve its schools.
A Cross-Disciplinary BreadNet Exchange:
Moving beyond the Facts ........................................................................ 32
by Mary Lindenmeyer
Believing that inert facts are a limited form of knowledge, an Arizona history
teacher teams up with an English teacher to explore connections between literature and history.
Bridging the Gap with Communications Technology ......................... 34
by Lou McCall
A New Mexico teacher combines technology and writing for the community to
build a bridge to real-world writing contexts that meet the standards.
Bread Loaf School of English • Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
3
Teacher Network
From the Director
James Maddox, Director
Bread Loaf School of English
Middlebury College
Middlebury VT
ttentive readers of our
magazine will have noticed that its title has
changed with this issue, from
Bread Loaf Rural Teacher Network Magazine to Bread Loaf
Teacher Network Magazine.
There is nothing sinister about
the dropping of “rural” from our
title: the Bread Loaf Rural
Teacher Network (BLRTN)
continues to exist, and Bread
Loaf maintains its firm, decades-old commitment to rural
teachers, students, and schools.
A little history will help to explain why we have made this
change.
The BLRTN was inaugurated
in 1993, with funding from the
first of two very generous
grants from the DeWitt Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund; this
money was later supplemented
by another generous grant from
the Annenberg Rural Challenge.
The BLRTN grew and flourished so spectacularly well that
we at Bread Loaf incorporated
its most successful features into
additional grant proposals, such
as those we have made successfully to state departments of
A
4
education in Alaska, Kentucky,
Ohio, and South Carolina. In
these later grants, however,
teachers who have been recruited are urban and suburban
as well as rural. Rather than
continue using a title that excluded some of our newly recruited teachers, we have made
the umbrella of the title wider,
and we are now happy to include in this network teachers
from, for example, Columbus,
OH, and Louisville, KY, as well
as from Shishmaref, AK, and
Tsaile, AZ.
I am delighted to announce
that Bread Loaf faculty member
Emily Bartels of Rutgers University has agreed to serve as
Associate Director of the Bread
Loaf School of English; Emily
has worked with BLTN teachers
in the past, as a consultant to a
Schools for the New Millennium grant at Laguna (NM)
Middle School and as a participant in our annual BLTN conference in Jekyll Island, GA, in
1999. As Emily joins the Bread
Loaf administration, I am staying on as director but am also
taking on new duties as Dean of
Graduate and Special Programs
at Middlebury College, where I
oversee the School of English,
the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Middlebury Language Schools.
In addition to other grants
that have been announced in
these pages in the past, we have
recently received from the Educational Foundation of America
a two-year grant for ten teachers
of Native students in Alaska,
Arizona, and New Mexico. The
Plan for Social Excellence is
funding six teachers from
Lawrence, MA, to attend Bread
Loaf in 2001. The Greenville
County (SC) School District
will fund five teachers to attend
Bread Loaf in 2001 and will increase that number in subsequent years. In 2000, Middlebury College itself gave eight
full fellowships for urban teachers to attend Bread Loaf/New
Mexico and will continue to
fund those teachers in 2001.
Bread Loaf is also a participant
in a U.S. Department of Education grant secured by the University of Alaska Southeast to
encourage Native Alaskan students to enter the teaching profession. Five mentors of these
teachers will be funded to attend Bread Loaf/Alaska in
2001.
One final piece of news.
Bread Loaf/New Mexico will be
in a new site beginning in the
summer of 2001: at the Institute
of American Indian Arts, in
Santa Fe. We look forward to
taking up residence there. ❦
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
The Challenge of Standards: Supporting
Content Standards While Honoring Local
Contexts for Learning
Dixie Goswami, Coordinator
BLTN
Bread Loaf School of English
Middlebury College
Middlebury VT
S
tandards, accountability, and
high stakes tests. When we talk
about teaching and learning,
those words seem always to be part of
the conversation. But something is
missing from national and local debates around these issues: the narratives of teachers who are struggling to
teach for understanding in the age of
accountability. Make no mistake,
implementing standards, preparing
themselves and students to do well on
tests, and being held accountable to
the public, parents, and the system are
essentially the responsibility of teachers. The teachers’ narratives in this
issue of Bread Loaf Teacher Network
Magazine represent a body of writing
that is essential to understand practice
in the context of standards.
I recommend reading this issue of
the magazine several times. Read first
for the pleasure that comes from the
compelling, original stories about
teaching that bring students and their
voices alive. For example, Hugh
Dyment writes about Alex and other
former students who he believes will
be well served by Alaska’s high
stakes test. He writes, “I welcome reasonable testing procedures that help
define standards of student achievement on which Alaska teachers can
agree.” Lorrie Jackson writes about
students in her special education
class—Ed, Dell, and Marcia—and
how she and her teaching partner
Cynthia Rucker devised standards for
their BreadNet exchange and in the
process raised tough questions that
are relevant to all teachers in classrooms where students’ abilities vary
widely. Tom McKenna writes about
Karina, what he learned from her
about standards and about his own
teaching, and about our need to develop a common language of standards that values the kind of growth
he observed in Karina. Jason Leclaire
writes about Ellen, who writes well
but who has not yet passed the required writing proficiency test.
There’s more.
Then read again to discover how
Bread Loaf teachers in very different
places are making a distinction between standards and standardization.
Insights like the ones provided by
Maria Offer, who listened to and
acted on advice from parents about
what students should read and why,
are important contributions to the
standards debate. Mary Lindenmeyer
tells how she and her students critiqued their BreadNet literary exchange with the writing and technology portions of the Arizona standards
in mind—and how they met the challenge of the test while engaged in
“new ways of textbook learning,” to
quote one of Mary’s students. Mary
and others contributing to this issue
appreciate the guidance that standards
offer, but admit that it takes a bold
teacher to act on the belief that students who are engaged in nontradi-
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
tional teaching and learning will nevertheless do well, as they must, on
high stakes tests.
And read this issue as a tribute to
the BLTN, a professional community
created and sustained by thoughtful,
activist teachers and their students,
who well understand that teaching and
learning are political acts, just as
implementing standards and high
stakes tests are political acts. The
teachers who contributed to this issue
are connected to their colleagues
across the country, electronically on
BreadNet, the electronic network of
the Bread Loaf School of English, and
by the shared inquiries and intellectual work they do during their summers of study at Bread Loaf. In my
view, their stories published here and
elsewhere are essential documents for
educators and policy-makers as they
struggle to support content standards
while honoring local knowledge and
situations and the needs of individual
children and young people.
This issue was inspired and informed by Alaska teachers who met
for a writing retreat in Anchorage in
2000. Annie Calkins and Scott Christian edited the chapters these teachers
wrote for a book entitled Standard
Implications: Alaskans Reflect on a
Movement to Change Teaching (Juneau: University of Alaska Southeast,
2000), which will be distributed to
teachers across Alaska and beyond. ❦
5
Teacher Network
A Call to Action: Standards in Alaska
Scott Christian
University of Alaska Southeast
Juneau AK
A
s a parent of two children in
Alaskan schools, as a former
classroom teacher in two
Alaskan school districts for twelve
years, and currently as the Director of
the Professional Education Center at
the University of Alaska Southeast,
where I assist teachers in pursuing
professional development, I would
like to make a call for action to all the
stakeholders involved in Alaskan education. Since our state is not unique in
its movement toward implementation
of standards and high stakes tests, I
think this call may apply to many
states where the standards movement
is manifesting itself in ways that are
both positive and negative for students, teachers, and society.
I think it’s important to begin by
considering why high stakes testing
initiatives have been launched. The
sad reality in both rural and urban
schools in Alaska is that many students graduate without the skills to
succeed in society. The grading of
student work is not linked directly to student performance:
A’s, B’s, and C’s are awarded
based largely on the percentage
of points earned during a
course, not according to an articulated standard on which
teachers in the discipline agree.
Opportunities are rare for students to apply their skills and
knowledge in complex, realworld situations on which they
will be evaluated by clear and
rigorous criteria. The result is
that students can earn high
grades without synthesizing
and applying their learning and
slide through the system with
minimal effort. As educators,
we cannot continue to deny
6
that our system is failing our students
and that fundamental change is
needed.
Certainly, there are many excellent, highly skilled teachers, who
regularly challenge students in relevant, academically rigorous settings.
There are outstanding schools and
teachers across the state, and many
students leave our system prepared for
the future. But there are also many
who move on without even a basic
knowledge of their potential to be
productive members of society. There
is much rhetoric about “teaching all
students.” But, realistically, in largescale systems, how do we get there
without some kind of accountability?
Although I have serious reservations
about the implementation of high
stakes testing nationwide and the nature and misuses of these often narrow minimum-competency tests, no
one can argue that the movement toward standards and accountability
hasn’t forced us to look closely at our
schools.
What’s good about the standards
movement in Alaska? First of all, the
Alaska Content Standards were written by the stakeholders, groups of
teachers, parents, community members and business leaders, and they
describe what students should know
and be able to do at several stages of
their education. In addition to the content standards, frameworks documents
were created for each content area to
guide curriculum committees in developing local curricula based on
these standards. Unfortunately, despite this important first step, the standards movement in Alaska lost momentum, largely because of a lack of
financial support. Regardless of the
rhetoric from the legislature, it is impossible to effect meaningful change
in a system as complex and diverse as
Alaska’s school system without the
resources to bring people together to
process the ideas and to make plans
for implementation. In the years
1997-1999 groups of educators met to
create performance standards in reading, writing, and mathematics. These
standards describe what students
should be able to do and how well
they should be able to do it. In short,
performance standards describe the
specific performances which indicate
proficiency, at the benchmark levels
(i.e. ages eight to ten, eleven to fourteen, and fifteen to eighteen).
If we think of these performance standards as a way for
students, parents, and teachers to share a common language, and to focus on high,
clear expectations for learning, the result should be
higher achievement.
T
Scott Christian and Doug Wood
at Bread Loaf in Vermont
here are two prevailing views of standards. There are
those who view standards as
convergent, as a means to
make sure that every teacher
is teaching the same thing at
the same time. Such a belief
is actually a belief in standardization in education,
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
which independent and creative Alaskan educators rightly ought to oppose.
Those who take a divergent view of
standards, as I do, believe standards
actually increase the amount of instructional freedom for teachers,
schools, and districts. Once a clear
vision exists for what students should
know and be able to do, there are infinite pathways, based on local resources and cultural perspectives, for
teachers and students to get there.
A careful process of adopting the
standards can lead to meaningful
school reform. Such was the case at
Glacier Valley Elementary in Juneau,
where teachers, parents, administrators, and community members met
regularly for two years to look closely
at students’ work, to create curriculum, and to plan and analyze meaningful assessments. The structure of
the school changed positively and dramatically as a result. However, the
adoption of standards can also lead to
the kind of high stakes test that is now
petency tests that have no impact on
learning and achievement. Teaching
to these tests crowds out the creative
elements in the curriculum. I think it
would be wise to implement standards-based instruction and assessment first, to provide quality, sustained professional development to
teachers across the state, then consider a high stakes assessment. As
Rick Cross, our Commissioner of
Education and Early Development,
recently asked at our literacy conference, “Do we know what it means to
teach all students?” In the first year of
testing, less than a third of our students passed the three tests in reading,
writing, and mathematics. Mr. Cross’s
point was that we need to allow our
systems the time to restructure so that
we can truly address the needs of all
learners. This has not been the practice of schools in Alaska. We have not
had the resources, the community
support, or the understanding necessary to reach all students.
There are those who view standards as convergent,
as a means to make sure that every teacher is teaching
the same thing at the same time. Such a belief is
actually a belief in standardization in education,
which independent and creative educators should
rightly oppose.
being implemented in Alaska, and
many other states. Under fire from
legislators and score-conscious administrators, some teachers are scrambling to teach to the test in order to
survive. But Alaskans can learn from
reform efforts that have been taking
place around the country.
Lesson number one: exit exams
have no impact on student achievement. Because of legal battles which
inevitably occur as soon as students
fail an exit exam, these tests often
become meaningless minimum-com-
Lesson number two: state takeovers of schools have failed miserably, resulting in lawsuits and open
hostility between the stakeholders and
the government. This is the one area
where our legislature is truly misinformed. We all know which schools
would receive the hammer blow in
such misguided efforts: for the most
part, these will be schools attended by
students in the lowest socioeconomic
brackets across Alaska. Mostly, these
will be rural schools.
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
A recent study analyzing the performance of students in Alaska’s rural
schools on standardized tests showed
that although the students are still
well below national and state averages
for performance, the composite scores
have nearly doubled since the rural
schools first opened in the late seventies. How can a system where the test
scores have doubled be labeled “in
crisis?” When we think about rural
schools, we have to remember that
these schools are relatively new to the
fabric of society in rural Alaska.
There haven’t been successive generations of parents who have attended
these public schools, as you will find
in urban areas. The idea that a group
of distinguished educators is going to
fly out to rural Alaska with wisdom
that has eluded the hardworking professionals who have worked and lived
in those communities is ludicrous.
Before we pick up the hammer to
punish schools and districts for low
scores on high stakes tests, let’s lay a
foundation for success that
these schools can build on. The
Rural Alaska Secondary Education Study Task Force Report of
1994 states: “The State should
enhance funding dedicated to
the support of public education.
It will be very difficult to improve the quality of rural high
school education under the constant threat of declining funding. For rural communities and
districts to offer a quality education, the State must insure a
more predictable and sustainable level of funding.” Six years
after the task force report, funding of
all Alaska schools, and particularly
rural schools, has continued to decline
in real dollars.
W
hat kind of foundational
structures must be in place
in order to ensure the successful adoption of standards in all
Alaskan schools?
(continued on next page)
7
Teacher Network
A Call to Action . . .
(continued from previous page)
School and Community Partnerships. In communities where education is a priority, students achieve
more. It’s that simple. Schools and
communities need to enter into a dialogue about standards and the expectations they have of students. Schools
need to interact with communities in
ways other than by requesting money.
That our schools desperately need reform is partly due to basic mistrust
and lack of communication among the
stakeholders of public education.
Improved Teaching Force.
Alaska can attract and retain the best
teachers in the country through higher
salaries. When I began teaching in
Alaska in 1985, our salaries were
ranked the highest in the nation. Now,
we’re ranked twenty-sixth. Last fall,
for the first time in recent memory,
there weren’t enough qualified applicants to fill the teaching openings in
Alaska. The situation will worsen,
especially in rural districts that have
been plagued by high turnover rates,
as the number of school-age children
continues to increase. Unless the legislature addresses this need with additional funding, the teaching force will
continue to decline. Moreover, if
we’re going to ask for higher salaries,
we need to engage in a discussion
about how we can work together to
improve the teaching force; until
teachers acknowledge the problem of
incompetence in the system and become a part of the effort to address
the issue, the teaching profession in
Alaska will suffer because of it.
High Quality Preservice and
Professional Development Programs. Innovative programs, such as
the standards-based Master of Arts in
Teaching Program at UAS, should be
available throughout the state. In order for systemic change to occur in
Alaskan schools, teachers need time
and support to further their own
knowledge, instructional skills, and
8
professional development. Our current system allows for as few as five
days of in-service in some systems,
and as little as forty-five minutes of
planning and collaboration time during the school day for teachers. As
funding has been dramatically reduced in real dollars over the last fifteen years for school districts, funds
for staff development have become
scarce or have disappeared entirely. In
addition to rethinking the content of
staff development opportunities, we
need to reëxamine the delivery models. Earning course credit for passive
learning and seat time doesn’t count
for much. We need to provide opportunities where teachers are asked provocative questions about learning and
assessment, where they have time to
read, think, discuss, and write about
these issues. If the legislature wants
world-class schools producing proficient students, we need to provide the
teaching force with the skills and resources to make this happen.
Standards for All. In addition to
the content standards for students,
there are also teacher standards, administrator standards, and school
standards in various stages of development. This process needs adequate
support so that all elements of our
education system will be equally responsible and accountable for student
success.
Culturally Responsive Schools.
The Rural Systemic Initiative has
launched a major effort to incorporate
indigenous ways of knowing into curriculum and assessment around the
state. If we want students from diverse cultural backgrounds to be successful in schools, we need to look
beyond our traditional Western models of instruction, curriculum, and assessment, and to incorporate diverse
ways of thinking and learning. The
“English Only” movement is counterproductive to the multicultural, multilingual reality of Alaskan schools.
Breaking the Mold. Although
there has been substantial change in
elementary and middle school classrooms around the state, with increasing numbers of multi-age classrooms,
schools within schools, interdisciplinary teaching, charter schools, language immersion programs, we have
a long way to go before our system
reflects best practices in instruction. I
think everything should be on the
table: curriculum, scheduling, class
size, physical space, instruction, assessment, and so on. All aspects of
our K-12 programs need to be reviewed by all stakeholders.
I’d like to make a call to educators
to become an active part of the political process. Three years ago when the
legislature was considering the exit
exam, there was an eerie silence
across the state as NEA Alaska endorsed the legislation and it moved
towards the governor’s desk for his
signature. Public school teachers have
tremendous work loads and responsibilities and impossible constraints
placed on them; unless we enter the
conversation with a voice that speaks
to standards and assessment and the
realities of classrooms and schools,
we can’t expect the governor and the
legislature to make informed, wellreasoned decisions. ❦
Scott Christian coordinates the
documentation and evaluation
of the Bread Loaf Teacher
Network. He formerly taught at
the middle school level in rural
Alaska for twelve years and
has published several articles
and chapters centered around
literacy and teacher research.
His book Exchanging Lives:
Middle School Writers Online
was published by NCTE in
1997. He lives in Juneau
Alaska with his wife and two
children.
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
BLTN: Strengthening Best Practices
in South Carolina
Diane Crenshaw
Dixie High School
Due West SC
A
t our state Bread Loaf fall
meeting, seven teachers are
sitting in a classroom at
Waccamaw High School. We are in a
focus group on “Collaboration with
Other Professional Organizations,”
and talk has been about our participation in the state conferences of the
Council of Teachers of English and
the International Reading Association. On the agenda is a note for this
focus group: “National Board Certification – where does Bread Loaf fit
in?”
It proves to be the most controversial topic in our otherwise harmonious focus group. The discussion covers the aims and process of National
Board Certification and raises larger
issues of accountability and the complex relationships of professionals in
the teaching community.
Among the seven teachers
present, one finished her National
Board work last year and is waiting
to see if she has passed; three teachers are in the process now; one is
considering doing it next year; and
two are opposed to the entire process
and plan not to become candidates.
* * *
In the week since our meeting,
I’ve been going over the issues
raised, trying to define them, trying
to analyze my decision to become a
candidate, and trying to see how, a
month into the process, I can make
sense of the accountability issue.
Teachers are always called on to
do more than be good in the classroom, good with students. This year
I’m wearing three accountability
hats: I’m on an ADEPT (Assisting,
Developing, and Evaluating Profes-
sional Teaching) evaluation team for a
teacher at another school; I’m a team
leader for SACS (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools) of the
Goals for Student Learning chapter;
and I’m a National Board candidate.
All are time-consuming, analytically
demanding, and personally stressful. I
need to make sense of accountability
or I won’t be able to make much
sense of anything else this year.
When we talk about accountability, anxiety rises. While most teachers
are proud of their classroom accomplishments, they’re not sold on any of
the methods by which those accomplishments are measured.
The two most frequently heard
words in South Carolina regarding
teacher accountability are “test
scores,” followed closely by “curriculum standards.” Current high stakes
exit exams and SAT tests, the implementation of a new and more difficult
standardized test for public school
students, and the institution of statemandated standards in all fields place
overwhelming pressure on teachers to
solve a multitude of educational difficulties. We’re being told we will
solve the problems; our jobs are on
the line.
While we all want to bring up test
scores, most of us don’t think a
checklist approach to the standards
will solve all of the problems. And,
while test scores are a part of how
teachers assess their effectiveness,
most of us don’t think test scores are
the best measure of how well we do
our jobs.
So in the midst of discussing curriculum standards and the tests that
evaluate how well the standards have
been learned, maybe this is a good
time to think about other measures of
teacher effectiveness and how we can
include them in a more realistic
teacher accountability package.
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
The three assessments I’m involved with this year have common
threads. The ADEPT evaluation process, National Board Certification,
and SACS accreditation indicate areas
in which teacher accountability can be
explored in a supportive and positive
context. When viewed together, they
give important insights about teaching
standards and the assessment of teaching effectiveness.
Diane Crenshaw
The ADEPT program is the most
frequently used teacher evaluation
instrument in South Carolina and in
many other areas. The process takes
an entire school year and looks at the
detailed work of a single teacher, with
improving student learning as the focus for the study. A teacher is examined in ten “Performance Dimensions,” including planning capability,
teaching strategies, content taught,
assessment practices, classroom envi-
(continued on next page)
9
Teacher Network
Strengthening Best
Practices
(continued from previous page)
ronment and classroom management,
and even the teacher’s activities outside the classroom, both professional
and community activities. The
ADEPT evaluation process was developed in part by the National Board
of Professional Teaching Standards,
the organization that developed National Board Certification.
Like ADEPT, the National Board
Certification process examines the
work of a single teacher, with the goal
of improving student learning through
improving teaching. National Board
Certification (NBC) looks at “The
Five Propositions of Accomplished
Teaching.” They are similar to the
Performance Dimensions of the
ADEPT process. To earn National
Board Certification, teachers demonstrate their knowledge of students,
subjects, instructional practices, and
classroom management. They must
show that they can assess their own
teaching and modify it as needed. The
final requirement is that teachers demonstrate their involvement in the community, both as professional educators
working with colleagues and as collaborators with parents and others in
the community in efforts to enhance
student performance.
While both ADEPT and NBC look
at teacher performance, NBC involves
a more comprehensive documentation
and reflection process. Certification
involves the planning, implementation, documentation, and reflection on
several lessons throughout the year, as
well as teacher reports and analysis of
student profiles, goals, and practices.
Information on each of five areas is
assembled in a portfolio. In addition
to assembling the portfolio, teachers
take a written test covering a variety
of professional issues.
The SACS accreditation process is
the broadest and most comprehensive
assessment of the three. While SACS
focuses on the work of the entire
school rather than a single teacher,
much of the investigation, documentation, planning, and implementation of
the SACS self-study speak directly to
issues of teacher effectiveness.
SACS self-studies involve teams
of educators, students, parents, and
community members—the stakeholders in local education—in examining
all aspects of what an individual
school does to provide the best educational opportunities for students. For
each area examined by SACS, the fo-
cus is always the same: What is the
school doing to improve student
learning?
After the self-study is completed, a
team of evaluators, composed of
classroom teachers and administrators, visits the school to determine
how the school is improving student
learning, both by addressing weaknesses identified during the self-study
and by building on strengths. The visiting team interviews the stakeholders
and examines documents to determine
the school’s progress towards its
goals.
N
BC, ADEPT, and SACS all
have as their theme the improvement of student learning, with the monitoring and analysis
of instruction as key components. All
tie instructional assessment to curriculum standards, and all set out standards by which effective learning can
be tied to effective teaching.
These three assessment programs
complement each other in defining
teaching standards and assessing
teaching effectiveness. Their common
threads:
• Teachers are assessed on the basis of
work with their students. However,
the work of students is in no way
limited to standardized test scores.
Teachers use state curriculum standards and communicate with each
other, parents, and the community to
determine what they expect from
students and to evaluate how well
they reach their goals. Students
learn better with support from outside the classroom, and teachers are
the primary link between school and
community.
• All three programs emphasize planning and reflection as essential to
the teaching process and to improving student learning.
• Teachers get to know their students
as individuals and, consequently,
can base their teaching on student
interests as well as on student needs.
Diane Crenshaw working with students on writing projects
10
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
It’s not enough to know a student’s
test scores. Involving students in
their own learning means reaching
out to them through all aspects of
their lives and responding to them as
complete individuals.
• Teachers master both their content
areas and instruction, producing effective lessons and effective assessments. They monitor student
progress in a variety of ways and are
flexible enough to change when
what they are doing isn’t working as
well as desired.
• Teachers are evaluated by other
teachers. Regardless of who else
participates in the evaluation, every
teacher can expect peer evaluation
as a part of the process.
• Teachers document their work. Assessment is sometimes not about
what teachers do but about what
teachers can document. While many
teachers believe that their most effective work cannot be documented,
a reality of the profession is that
teachers can document many of the
ways they affect students, and documentation must be provided for any
assessment or accountability process
to capture a teacher’s performance
accurately.
• Teachers use the processes to develop their own goals and assess
their professional growth in supportive, non-confrontational situations.
In NBC, ADEPT, and SACS accreditation, teachers have lots of room
for setting their own goals and enhancing their teaching in ways they
determine, and the common goals of
the programs are worthy pursuits for
professional teachers. So, why the
controversy in our focus group?
Those negative about National
Board Certification, for example,
raise valid and troubling concerns.
They see certification as one more
burden placed on teachers who are
already straining in the traces. Those
more cynical see it as a series of
hoops to jump through with little direct impact on learning. They are distressed that certification is evaluated
by teachers who are not necessarily
certified themselves. And they see it
as an arbitrary choice of state departments of education to give significant
financial rewards to this process and
not to others equally challenging,
such as completing the Bread Loaf
degree program.
Those involved in the certification
process, however, are very favorable.
Judy Ellsesser, a National Board Certified Bread Loaf teacher, says, “I
think it is one of the most satisfying
and personally enriching experiences
I ever went through.” She and Eva
Howard, who contributed an article
on the National Board to this publication last spring, have been active in
helping colleagues develop their portfolios, both in person and on line.
H
ave I made any personal
sense of the issue yet? Two
months ago I was asked why
I was doing National Board, besides
wanting the salary increase. I had to
say I didn’t know; I was doing it for
the money. Now I see benefits I didn’t
expect. The Bread Loaf Teacher
Network is helping make National
Board possible for me. The classes
at Bread Loaf model the best practices of teachers (the basis for the
National Board portfolio), and they
also provide the analytical tools for
looking at our own classes. Bread
Loaf helps provide me some teaching skills that National Board requires in planning, presenting, and
reflecting on the work of my students and on my own accomplishments. The learning traditions at
Bread Loaf—of respecting and paying close attention to what others
say, of finding and developing
meaning from texts and dialogue,
and of relying on fellow teachers as
colleagues and coaches—all
strengthen the work required for
National Board.
I understand what other National
Board teachers I’ve met mean when
they talk about how enriching it can
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
be. I already have more contact with
and support from parents than I
dreamed possible, a direct result of
National Board work. I have new respect for the teachers who went
through the training to become assessors this past summer and who are
sharing what they learned with the
rest of us as we pursue certification
together. I’m looking at what goes on
in my classroom with an intensity I’ve
never had before.
Assessing teacher effectiveness is
mandated by parents, politicians, and
by educators themselves, even though
there is more consensus about how
not to assess teaching than how to do
it fairly and accurately. If we teachers
are expected to tackle these important
issues, we must be provided with reasonable time to plan, analyze, assess,
and document how effective our
teaching is.
These assessment processes may
not redefine our ideas of what good
teachers do, but they can make us
more articulate about how teacher accountability goes beyond test scores
and how good teaching goes beyond
addressing curriculum standards. The
assessment of our teaching is as serious a responsibility as assessment of
our students’ growth, and the assessment approaches should work together to help our students and improve ourselves. ❦
Diane Crenshaw has
taught English at Dixie
High School in Due
West, South Carolina,
for eleven years. She
completed her first
summer at Bread Loaf in
2000 as a South Carolina State Department of
Education Fellow.
11
Teacher Network
Raising the Bar with High Stakes Tests
Hugh Dyment
Bethel Alternative Boarding School
Bethel AK
T
he same year I attended my
first summer at Bread Loaf in
Vermont, the Alaska Department of Education and teachers from
throughout the state began a long process of articulating content area standards. Last year our sophomores became the first high school class required to take the Alaska High School
Graduation Qualifying Exam
(HSGQE). This exam tests students’
reading comprehension, writing, and
mathematics abilities. Each of the
three sub-tests must be passed at some
point in order for a student to earn an
Alaskan high school diploma.
There is a reason that for the first
time, before receiving a diploma, my
students must prove their abilities in
the three R’s to someone other than
their teachers. Simply put, Alaska’s
elected state legislature wants to ensure something that the state’s educational establishment apparently cannot. Namely, the legislature wants to
change the fact that thousands of
Alaskan high school graduates, predominantly poor minorities, cannot
read, write, or do arithmetic at levels
even close to twelfth-grade.
Despite very good intentions and
the millions of dollars being spent
annually, Alaska’s publicly funded
school systems have not been able to
ensure that their graduates can read,
write and compute. Yet these skills
are the foundation and a prerequisite
to a person’s ability to think well in a
modern and complex society and
economy.
A typical example is a student,
whom I will call Alex, who just transferred to my school, an alternative
school. A twelfth grader with no history of behavioral or learning problems, Alex had earned straight C’s
and B’s for the last three years. Yet
12
his reading and writing skills are at a
sixth or seventh grade level. His math
computational skills are lower. By
May this young man will have completed all of the school district’s
course requirements and will receive a
high school diploma; yet he has
trouble making change (passing the
HSGQE will not be required until December of 2001). This is not an extreme or rare occurrence but rather
something I have seen repeatedly in
the eleven years I have taught in
Alaska. The public, Alex and his parents, and the state legislature know
that such learning deficiencies can
easily condemn a young person to the
margins of our economic and political
system. Without basic knowledge and
skills, the “Alexes” of Alaska will be
unable to adapt to a changing
economy or to effect change in the
world around them.
The community college in our area
has pointed out that many of our
school district’s graduates, even those
with a 3.0-plus GPR, need to take at
least a year’s worth of remedial
classes before they can attempt college-level courses. It’s an unfortunate
phenomenon and a serious political
issue as well because at
one point our school
board and our former
superintendent even discussed the idea of paying for our district’s
former students who
needed to take remedial
courses.
This situation had to
change, and Alaska’s
public schools couldn’t
do it as a system without
outside mandates: it’s
that simple.
I don’t know how the
standards movement is
developing in other
states, but I’m a supporter of what’s happening in Alaska, warts and
all. Ninety-five percent of the students
I teach are Yup’ik Eskimo. Ninety
percent of my students are poor and
seventy percent score in the bottom
quartile of nationally-normed assessment tests of academic achievement.
Some would argue that the playing
field is not level for these students
and they would be right: it’s not. Most
of my students come from homes
where Yup’ik is the first language;
many come from homes affected by
the ills of poverty, including substance abuse and family or community tragedies. Yet despite the disadvantages, my students are expected to
take the same test that those from
more encouraging socioeconomic
backgrounds will take, and they
should because they can pass it.
Regardless of socioeconomic circumstances, students all across Alaska
are earning diplomas that presumably
mean something. But what does an
Alaskan diploma signify? The standards of a school in one community
are not the same as those in another
community. Essentially, student
grades are based on comparisons between the skill levels of students in
the community and not on an articu-
Hugh Dyment
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
lated, statewide standard of achievement. Because of this, employers and
post-secondary institutions know that
an Alaskan diploma does not signify a
certain standard of achievement.
Despite linguistic particularity and
troublesome backgrounds, my students can pass the HSGQE. I have
had dozens of students make dramatic
gains academically. These students
invariably have one thing in common—they try hard. In twelve years
of teaching in both rural New Hampshire and Alaska, I have never known
a student who failed to meet an academic challenge if he or she tried hard
enough. This notion may seem naive,
old-fashioned, or simplistic, but barring legitimately diagnosed neurological problems or learning disabilities, it
is my experience. My students can
achieve academically when they are
expected to and when they make a
conscientious effort to learn, and I’ve
seen the HSGQE encourage this effort.
The HSGQE is a high stakes
exam, but unlike in many Asian and
European countries where a single test
taken in adolescence can seal one’s
fate, the HSGQE, or portions of it,
can be taken up to five times in high
school, beginning in sophomore year.
By law, students are allowed six attempts after they leave high school.
Teams of teachers, administrators,
and members of the public determined
the cutoff scores, which seem to me,
in the areas of writing and reading,
rather modest levels of achievement.
Moreover, between the third and
eighth grades, three similar comprehensive assessment exams are administered to assess whether students are
on track or need academic interventions.
I have seen the test that is given in
this state and it seems reasonable. It is
not the kind of multiple answer test I
took in high school in preparation for
college admissions. The HSGQE requires writing of essays in response to
“real life” scenarios, editing of mistakes, short-answer responses to reading excerpts, applied mathematical
problems, descriptive writing of how
mathematical problems are solved,
etc. The test is essentially untimed in
that one day per sub-test is allowed,
though on average only three to four
hours are needed.
Tests are not a problem if the test
is a good one, nor is teaching to the
test a problem because the skills the
test assesses are those that high school
graduates should have. I have seen
fear in my students’ eyes when they
talk about the HSGQE, but I’ve seen
relief, pride, and self-confidence
when they pass portions of it. By
implementing this testing procedure,
the state of Alaska has said to my students, “Here’s the bar. If you choose,
you can and will learn the skills you
need to get over it.”
A team of teachers and educators
comprises a committee called the
School Designator Committee, which
will issue student testing results on
schools and districts (already these
are reported in the local papers).
One of the big issues has been
whether the state should step in and
take action if a certain percentage of
students do not demonstrate proficiency. Some question the fact that
there are provisions in the law that
allow the state department of education to “take over” under-performing
schools. But this fear supposes an
adversarial relationship between the
state department and Alaska’s school
districts that I don’t believe exists. In
fact, it appears the state department is
more interested in observing the development of a school district’s test
scores than it is in “taking over” districts where the numbers indicate low
percentages of passing students.
Is mandating such testing fair to an
under-performing school faced with
socioeconomic conditions that dramatically affect students’ efforts? Is it
fair to a hardworking teacher to be
told that there are better methods that
he or she must follow? These are difficult ethical questions, and I am uncertain. But I do know that it is not
fair to award high school diplomas to
students who have not achieved even
eighth-grade skill levels. As a teacher,
I welcome reasonable testing procedures that help define standards of
student achievement on which
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
Alaska’s teachers and the public can
agree.
Unlike most states, our public
schools are funded directly by the
state using a funding formula that
takes into account the higher expenses
in rural areas. Except for a few metropolitan areas, Alaska’s school systems
are not funded by property taxes, so
we don’t see the resulting disparity in
amounts spent per pupil that exists in
other states. Currently, we are spending between $11,000 and $13,000 annually per rural pupil. Anchorage and
Fairbanks, which do raise educational
dollars through property taxes, are
supplemented by about $3,700 per
student. When students do poorly in
Alaska, lack of funding is not the
cause. While spending more money
can’t hurt, spending more does not
necessarily result in improved student
performance. Setting reasonable standards and motivating students to
achieve them over a sustained period
of time will create positive changes in
those students’ lives as well as in the
general state of education in Alaska.
I’m optimistic about the possibilities but not naive. If a high percentage
of my students are going to pass the
HSGQE, they will need to learn more.
Thus, I expect my state legislature,
which presumably wants the same
thing, to increase funding for effective
after-school and summer programming so my students are given the
opportunity to learn more. The typical
voter in Alaska should expect no less
from the legislature. To date, we have
been receiving funding for such programs, though it comes from a federal
source.
Fortunately for my student Alex,
his school focuses much of its program on developing vocational skills,
forthrightly addressing substance
abuse problems, remediating academic deficiencies, and impressing
upon Alex that he can succeed in almost any way he chooses. Helping
Alex become a person who can read,
write, and do arithmetic must also be
(continued on next page)
13
Teacher Network
Raising the Bar . . .
(continued from previous page)
accompanied, I believe, by helping
him become a good person, someone
who will stand up, speak his mind
when he is called to do so. Alex, like
all good students, is learning to forgo
immediate gratification in order to
reach long-term goals and the greater
satisfaction that comes with them.
When I think of my former students, I am saddened by thoughts of
those now dead, from violence and
suicide, those who have been trapped
in the cycle of substance abuse or
child abuse, living lives of resentment
and self-pity. Yet I also consider
those students who are now bush pilots, those studying to be teachers, the
ones active in their churches and
faiths, the young couples providing
for their little babies, those who are
becoming nukalpiaq (master hunters),
and those who are living simple, giving lives. These are not things that can
be assessed in a single test, nor are
they things that curricula can be designed to teach well. These standards
are learned by example. ❦
Hugh Dyment has taught
Yup'ik Eskimo students in
western Alaska for eleven
years. His teaching experience includes English
literature, English as a
second language, special
education, social studies,
and remedial math. He
spends much time with his
family, subsistence hunting
and fishing. Hugh will
graduate from Bread Loaf
this summer.
Andover Bread Loaf
The Andover Bread Loaf Writing Workshop (ABLWW), directed by Lou Bernieri of
Phillips Academy, Andover, MA, recruits teachers from the Lawrence, MA, area and
abroad each summer for intensive writing workshops. Throughout this program teachers
of Lawrence have collaborated with teachers from Pakistan, Kenya, India, and
Bangladesh.
International Connections
Andover Bread Loaf/Lawrence
Teacher Network: The Amigo
The following is an excerpt from the
essay “Writing in the Pakistani Classroom: An Invitation to Change,” written
by Principal Mohsin Tejani, a 1997 alumnus of the Andover Bread Loaf Writing
Workshop. Mohsin, now in his third year
at the Bread Loaf School of English, was
recently awarded a grant from Write to
Change, a not-for-profit organization, to
support writing for the community
projects at his school in Karachi, Pakistan. Mohsin is also a Director of ABL’s
International Projects. In August 2000, he
and Hazel Lockett co-directed the ABL
Millennium Conference in Karachi.
“ABL is very much about community—we all grow and thrive in supportive nonjudgmental, democratic, creative
communities (which are usually hard to
find). Building these kinds of communities is critical to the kind of teaching and
learning in ABL. . . .
“The liberatory pedagogy helps individual teachers to identify their strengths
and weaknesses, and to decide the path
and pace of professional development
they want to adopt. Hence it’s up to the
individual teacher in the program to decide what to do with the knowledge he or
she is generating (during the summer
workshop). To elaborate on this a bit
more, ABL opens doors to avenues, methods, and approaches to education in general, and the teaching of writing in particular. It does not, however, preach or
impose any particular methodology on
learning theory but lets the teacher decide
what is good for his or her personality and
classroom.”
A dozen associates of the ABL Writing Workshop were invited to Karachi,
Pakistan, for a cultural exchange with
forty teachers of the Aga Khan schools, a
progressive network of schools throughout Central Asia and East Africa. The
participants focused much of their activity
on writing and learning how other cultures approach pedagogical issues. Four
Bread Loafers participated: Tamarah
Pfeiffer, Hazel Lockett, Rich Gorham,
and Sam Swope. Sam’s story about the
experience, including his photographs,
was featured in the February, 2001, issue
of Teacher Magazine. ❦
Exchange
Andover Bread Loaf alumni conducted several exciting exchanges with
teachers from the Bread Loaf Teacher
Network. Paradigm Fellow Mary
Guerrero organized two of these exchanges at the Oliver School in Lawrence,
MA. One exchange partnered twelve
Oliver students in grades three through
seven in a writing exchange with preservice teachers in Juneau, AK, under the
direction of Karen Mitchell. The other
project, the Amigo Exchange, partnered
students from Mary’s class with middle
school students from Emily Rinkema’s
class in Hinesburg, VT. Mary reported the
following about the partnership:
“The Amigo Exchange has only just
begun, yet it is already a success. My first
grade bilingual students tell all visitors,
including parents on report card night,
that they are ‘anthropologists.’ They are
learning how other people live, work,
play, eat, and dress. My first graders are
learning about others, but just as importantly they are learning about themselves.
They are amazed to find out there are students who don’t speak Spanish, don’t eat
rice and beans, and don’t walk to the
nearby city school wearing blue and white
uniforms.
“As part of the project, my students,
partner teacher Kathy Osberg, and I have
been taking walking tours of our neighborhood. We have visited all the students’
homes to take photos. The students have
also been taking cameras home to take
photos of their favorite places within the
home. . . .
“It is hard to describe my students’
reaction to the photos sent from Vermont.
I wish I had recorded their responses with
a video camera. The students showed extreme interest, wonder, inquisitiveness,
and happiness. We sat in a circle on the
carpet and passed the photos around. The
students reacted at times with complete
silence, then oohing and aahing, giggling,
and chatting. We didn’t even need to raise
our hands to speak, everyone was so absorbed. . . .” ❦
Reprinted with permission from Andover Bread Loaf Writing Workshop News
14
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
Excellence for All and from All: A Look at
Standards in One Inclusion Classroom
Lorrie Jackson
Linden-McKinley High School
Columbus OH
Dear Joe, I am hapy you cante the
mante. I lik cante to. Will you mante
back? From Ed
I
was stumped when I read the
above note. A student in my class,
Ed, is a friendly and talkative
freshman who can tell you what he
wants to write, and what he says
makes sense (I have changed the
names of students in this article in
order to protect their privacy). Ed’s
learning disability, however, causes
his writing to be very difficult to understand, with any words longer than
one syllable replaced with words such
as mante, cante, and hante. Yet Ed is
just one of many students with identified special needs who participated
successfully in a recent writing
project I carried out on BreadNet between Cynthia Rucker’s students and
mine. The unique characteristics of
our inclusion classes, not surprisingly, affected how we defined our own standards for
classroom work. With modifications for special education
students, we discovered that all
students can, as Bread Loaf
Professor Jackie Royster says,
achieve excellence in learning
academic content through interactive writing with peers.
This online writing exchange centered on Homer’s
Odyssey. Two of Cynthia
Rucker’s freshman English
classes from Maysville High
School in rural Zanesville,
Ohio, and my two classes from Linden-McKinley High School in innercity Columbus, Ohio, read excerpts
from the epic poem and then wrote
poems, letters, short stories, and essays. In addition, Vivian Axiotis, another Ohio English teacher who is
currently on sabbatical writing poetry
in Greece, emailed poems to our students and responded to their questions
about Greece, writing, and poetry.
This writing exchange was the
first one for Cynthia and me. Admittedly, we were ambitious with the volume and quality of writing we expected our students to generate. It became clear early on that we would
need to base more of our grading of
student work on the process (did you
do the assignment?) and less on product (is every comma where it should
be?). Yes, the pangs of guilt for lowering our expectations indeed afflicted
us, but we decided that high standards
in the classroom, at least for now,
meant establishing a fluid and positive dialogue between our students
rather than achieving perfect writing.
What exactly are standards? Beyond their definition as state- or lo-
cally-mandated expectations for academic performance, standards also
refer to our own expectations for performance in the classroom. Given the
variety of teaching philosophies and
the autonomy most of us have in the
classroom, it is not surprising that
teachers use many different ways to
define standards.
At times English teachers emphasize the quality of the product and
must therefore edit and reëdit student
drafts until high expectations have
been met. This is usually the case
when we expect to publish student
writing in a literary magazine or some
other school publication. At other
times, however, teachers may prefer
to let students do the editing. Peer editing by students may not always be
letter perfect, but the process of practicing these skills for a real audience,
such as in a BreadNet exchange, is
valuable nonetheless. Most teachers
vary the way they teach writing, emphasizing product and process at different times according to how students are performing.
When Cynthia and I first discussed
setting standards for our exchange, we
had no idea what challenges
we would encounter with
our inclusion classes. We
expected to edit some texts
but let most be edited or
reviewed by students, allowing the power of the
“real audience” to help improve student work. From a
discussion at the fall 2000
Ohio meeting for Bread
Loaf teachers, we knew
such an “audience-focused”
view on standards was
fairly common. What made
our situation somewhat unusual was the addition of a
Lorrie Jackson
(continued on next page)
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
15
Teacher Network
Excellence for All . . .
(continued from previous page)
significant number of students receiving special education services.
Inclusion can be defined simply as
the mainstreaming of students with
special needs into a traditional classroom, ideally in roughly equal proportions. My inclusion class is co-taught
with Tiffany Chavers, the chair of our
Special Education Department. We
teach a general education curriculum
in a team-teaching style, modifying or
pulling children out only when the
need is present. Our ultimate goal, as
always, is to ensure that each child is
challenged and is capable of meeting
the challenge.
A third of the students in one of
my classes is identified as having specific learning disabilities or mental
retardation (see end note). In addition,
there are two other such students
mainstreamed in my other class and
three or four more students in both
classes who show signs of possible
special needs but have yet to be identified as such. Cynthia has one student
doing the exchange who receives special education services.
What impact does the mandate of
inclusion have on how we constructed
our standards for our exchange? Look
back at the letter which begins this
story. How would you grade that letter based upon your own standards in
the classroom? Most letters sent back
and forth between pen pals were simply reviewed, by Cynthia or me, for
appropriate subject and language, and
little editing was done. Yet, Ed’s letter could not be left as such; it was
incomprehensible. Other students had
similar struggles in their writing. Dell
and Marcia (not their real names), for
example, were overwhelmed by an
assignment that asked them to write
short stories that included themselves
and their exchange partners as characters. The assignment was only five
paragraphs and could have been a
16
simple rewrite of stories we had already read that year, but these students were unable to make progress in
this assignment. How then do we foster excellence for them while ensuring
the standards remain high? This important question is central to effective
teaching in inclusion classrooms, and
it is one that is relevant to all teachers
in classrooms where students’ abilities vary widely.
A number of modifications were
made to our exchange that facilitated
learning for all students and ensured
standards were high. These included
the following:
Careful Pairing of Online Writing
Partners. Cynthia and I spent a Saturday afternoon over coffee, identifying
students who would need special attention and linking them with students
who would have the maturity and sensitivity to work well with the DH or
LD student. These pairings were entirely successful. Regular education
students in both classes, most of the
time, were unaware that their partner
had special educational needs. When
a situation, such as a hard-to-read letter, made it obvious that the writer
had difficulties, the feedback given by
his or her partner was always supportive and positive.
Observing and Utilizing Teachable
Moments. Regular and special education students from both schools complained a few times about the errors,
sloppiness, or inconsistency they saw
in writings from their exchange partners. Cynthia and I used these instances to remind our students that
we are all human and make mistakes.
As we were quick to point out, no one
was immune to routine typos, but we
can learn from our mistakes and the
mistakes of others without being critical.
Using Resources. When a student
had difficulty communicating his or
her thoughts on paper, both teachers
attempted to find other means to get
the text written. For example, in my
class, my co-teacher Tiffany worked
one-on-one with Ed, typing his
thoughts as they were spoken and enabling him to have a product as neat
and as correct as his peers. His exchange partner got the same quality
letter as did the rest of his classmates.
On another assignment, Tiffany created a “cheat sheet” on which paragraphs for a basic story were typed up
with blanks for main characters, actions, events, etc. Having an inclusion
teacher work together with the students to help them write just what
they want to say is invaluable. Inclusion teachers, incidentally, are available to help any student in the class,
not just “their” students. Often, the
inclusion teacher can provide new
perspectives and ideas for everyone,
not just those who have special needs.
Continuing Open Dialogue on
BreadNet and in Person. Cynthia
and I never let one small challenge
with a student or class prevent us
from getting our exchange off the
ground. We were eager and ready to
tweak the system when needed so that
standards were maintained while
making sure no students were steamrolled in that quest for quality. Close
communication between Cynthia and
me was critical to our success.
Holding students to high standards
in the English classroom is never
easy, and when a writing exchange
involves students who have difficulty
in communication, reaching those
standards may be more difficult. But
the rewards are there. Anyone who
has ever taught an inclusion class, or
simply a class with one or more special education students, knows that
placing a child in his or her least restrictive environment brings benefits
in learning.
Setting and achieving standards in
classrooms like mine raise one important question: Am I willing to modify
my instruction to make the standards
reachable? If so, then every student
can experience success in a regular
education environment and become
more self-confident. This in turn leads
to higher academic achievement in
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
general. And that growing excellence
is precisely what BreadNet exchanges
should be about: high standards and
ways to achieve those expectations for
all students at all times.
Pat Truman Named Alaska
Teacher of the Year
End Note: Currently, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) defines a
specific learning disability as a disorder of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in
using language, spoken or written, that
manifests itself in an imperfect ability
to listen, think, read, write, spell, or to
do mathematical calculations. The
term also includes such conditions as
perceptual disabilities, brain injury,
minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia,
and developmental aphasia. Mental
retardation, formerly called a developmental handicap, is defined by ODE
as a significantly subaverage general
intellectual functioning existing concurrently with deficits in adaptive behaviors and manifested during the developmental period that adversely affects a child’s educational performance. IQ for a child with MR must
be no greater than 80. ❦
Editorial Note: The following is excerpted from a press release published on November 10, 2000, on the Web site of the Office of the Governor of Alaska. For
more information go to http://www.gov.state.ak.us/press/00280.html. Pat
Truman is a member of the Bread Loaf Teacher Network and an alumna of the
Bread Loaf School of English.
Lorrie Jackson teaches
ninth grade English and a
writer’s seminar at
Linden-McKinley High
School in Columbus,
Ohio. In addition, she
conducts an after-school
poetry workshop for
urban students. A recipient of an Ohio-Rise
Fellowship, she attended
Bread Loaf’s Vermont
campus in the summer of
2000.
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
A
laska’s 2001 Teacher of the Year is Patricia Truman, an eighth grade
language arts teacher at Palmer Junior Middle School, a school where
she has taught for fourteen years. Truman has twenty-six total years of
experience as a teacher and was also Matanuska-Susitna Borough School
District’s Teacher of the Year. Governor Tony Knowles made the announcement
today during remarks to the Association of Alaska School Boards.
“Patricia Truman has the qualities and abilities of Alaska’s best teachers,
who are working hard in their classrooms all over the state to improve the lives
of children,” Knowles said. “She will do an outstanding job representing the
teaching profession during the next year.”
“I am pleased to appoint Patricia to serve as Alaska’s 2001 Teacher of the
Year,” said Rick Cross, Commissioner of Education and Early Development. “I
will be submitting her name as Alaska’s candidate for the 2001 National
Teacher of the Year competition in Washington, D.C. She puts children first and
is on equal footing with candidates from all states to win the National Teacher of
the Year honor.”
Truman has also taught in Fairbanks and Montana. She is one of ten teachers
in Alaska who has earned certification by the National Board of Professional
Teaching Standards. She is a member of the Alaska State Reading Association,
National and Alaska Councils of Teachers of English, Alaska State Writing
Consortium, and the Bread Loaf Teacher Network. She has received a National
Endowment for the Humanities Award and is a school consultant who provides
language arts training for teachers in other districts for the Alaska Department of
Education & Early Development.
“Teaching is a skill that is never mastered; there is always a better way to
teach or to explain a concept more thoroughly or more effectively,” Truman
wrote in her Teacher of the Year application. “Teaching is my aspiration to
achieve the same level of thoughtfulness that I reach for every day.
“My most important accomplishments as a teacher cannot be listed on a resume, pasted in a scrapbook, or captioned under a yearbook picture. Those accomplishments are intangible and immeasurable because I can never fully know
the scope of my influence. My students do not immediately realize my effectiveness as a teacher. Many come back later to tell me. Some become writers; some
become English teachers. More importantly, most are successful. Students’ successes are my most profound accomplishments,” she wrote.
A statewide selection committee appointed by Commissioner Cross recommended Truman from a field of four finalists. A screening committee earlier recommended the finalists from a field of twelve applicants submitted by school
district selection committees, which consist of parents, school administrators,
teachers, students, and business and other community leaders. The Alaska
Teacher of the Year term begins January 1, 2001. ❦
17
Teacher Network
Karina: A Personal Perspective on High
Stakes Standards and Growth
Tom McKenna
University of Alaska Southeast
Juneau AK
Editorial Note: A version of this article first appeared in Standard Implications published in 2000 by University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau.
A
nyone interested in hearing a
story about teaching to Standard A?
I didn’t think so.
I often wonder about the vocabulary we use to describe students’ experiences with the education we provide for them. We talk about content
standards, performance standards,
benchmarks, key elements, rubrics,
attainment targets, and high stakes
assessments. We search for ways to
isolate competencies and disseminate
“best practices,” and in so doing we
talk to one another about lessons,
units, and structures needed to maximize the potential of students. We talk
about students being “completely engaged” in a process of “being able to
know and do” this or that (and thus
they are at least a decade more
evolved from their predecessors, who
were “on task”). We teach to the standards.
If we’re paying attention, though,
our students will remind us occasionally to examine the language of standards and accountability to determine
to what extent the language truly describes the meaning of students’
work. Does the language we use as
high school English teachers—and the
educational culture that that language
fosters—encourage students to see
themselves in the unfolding narrative
of their own potential?
And so I’ve chosen to tell a story,
which is not exactly about teaching to
Standard A (“A student should be
able to speak and write well for a variety of purposes and audiences”),
though indeed evidence of this stan-
Tom McKenna (right) with Michelle Wyman-Warren and Dan Furlow
at BLTN meeting in Taos, NM
18
dard and many others is implicit in
this story. I think the story is more
about the complexity of responding to
a student’s personal work. It’s about
following that student to a significant
moment of growth—her own selfselected “high stakes assessment.”
A
t eight o’clock the sun has
just set behind the gray silhouettes of the volcano and
its accompanying peaks, and a platinum light fills the bay between the
pinnacled horizon and the crab boats,
the cannery, and the muddy street
called Broadway. An old trailer home
turned post office, the bar, two restaurants, and a cluster of single-story
houses frame the scene in my
memory. In the center of these buildings is a weathered red warehouse
with the unlikely phrase “Roller
Rink” above the door. A motley
bunch of old trucks and newer cars—
all of them mud-spattered—is assembled on the edges of the red building, and the “driveway,” a sloppy
eddy of the street’s mud flow, is
crowded with vehicles, too. Along the
side of the building, two figures are
sitting on a long creosote log,
hunched over, facing away from the
door. I am one of these two, and I tentatively reach my arm out stiffly to
embrace the shoulder of my student,
Karina. She pauses, as if startled, then
leans further forward burying her face
in her hands. “Oh, my God! I’m not
going back in there! I can’t.”
“You’re gonna blow ’em away!” I
had told Karina earlier in the day in a
hurried exchange in the hallway of the
high school. Although she had never
acknowledged that she’d rise to my
challenge of reading her recently published piece at the community coffeehouse, Karina’s tweed blazer and her
neatly combed hair that Friday morning told me what her decision was.
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
She smirked uncomfortably, her
braces showing for only a second, and
as she walked down the hall, she
looked more like a college sophomore
than the young high school freshman
that she was.
The coffeehouse events were a
relatively new phenomenon in our
community, and I think even the local
arts council was surprised by their
popularity. In a remote industrial fishing town, with a population dominated by transient blue collar workers
from all over the Pacific Rim, even
the most bohemian spirits were
moved by the range and depth of
“performers” who turned out to share
their voices and their musical talents
before a supportive crowd. Calloused
welders shared the stage with bashful
style, structure, or theme, for exactly
twelve minutes. At the end of each
week, students would develop one
piece into a draft to be submitted to
student editors, who would confer
with the writers and publish those final drafts that conformed to our increasingly sophisticated definition of
“good writing.” Most highly valued in
the writing was truthfulness.
The weekly publication took off.
Every Friday it was a text for each of
my ninth through twelfth grade
classes, and copies of the publication
were practically ripped out of my
hands as I offered them to kids rushing out of the building for the weekend.
Karina’s older sister was in the
sophomore class, and her mom had
asked me if it would be okay if Karina
Although the standards may be moving us in some
ways closer, we haven’t yet arrived at an adequate
common language of standards that articulates and
values the kind of growth I observed in Karina.
children, longtime residents, newcomers, and published poets.
At our high school, freshmen
rarely published in Winter Bay, the
school’s weekly literary magazine.
This photocopied publication was
managed by sophomores in a Writing
for Publication class that I had developed after a great experience as a student in a similarly-styled class taught
at Bread Loaf by writing professor
and author Ken Macrorie. In our
sophomore class, we had achieved a
rare balance between following routine academic deadlines and what I
think was intrinsic motivation among
students. Somehow, it became cool to
be published. We started every class
with a short model piece, discussed its
merits for a few minutes, then dove
into freewriting in response to its
submitted a piece. An account of the
death of her younger cousin the previous summer in a nearby community,
Karina’s piece read like an obituary.
Her aunt was walking Karina’s cousins down the road when a bear surprised them. As the aunt tried to grab
her three-year-old’s hand, little Benjamin broke away and the bear for
some reason attacked and killed him.
Karina felt both devastated and guilty
because she and some friends had not
taken him four-wheeling with them
that day.
After a tough week of negotiating
the written comments of student editors, and some one-on-one conferencing with me, Karina had developed
her story to express an astonishing
emotional sophistication. The new
version registered the shocking qual-
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
ity of the news on a boring morning
of cannery work, the chill beauty of
the weather at the funeral, and the surreal denial she and her sister experienced, thinking they might have seen
Benjamin’s likeness darting from the
side of his now empty house.
I was so proud of Karina for persevering through her grief, for applying
lessons she seemed to be learning
from our reading of Steinbeck and
from her older peers, that I practically
begged her to read her recently published piece to the community at the
coffeehouse that night.
Probably seventy people had gathered in the dark hall when Karina
came up to the microphone in the
spotlight. She followed a published
poet and writing professor and an accomplished violinist. I imagine the
stillness outside was as pure and rare
as the stillness inside when she read.
Her hands shaking, she at first stammered the title, a humorless pun on
her late cousin’s last name: “Bears
Don’t Eat Bears.” But she steadied as
she gave brush strokes of setting, the
cannery drudgery, the coffee breaks,
and finally her mother skidding up in
the truck, beginning the story and
straining to keep back her own tears.
In a matter of a minute or two she had
cast a spell of silence so heavy that it
began to choke her. “Benjamin . . .”
Pause. “Benjamin is . . .” Silence.
Karina looked out at me for a long
second, then hung her head and
walked blindly off the stage, through
the crowd and out the door.
I don’t know how long Karina and
I sat next to one another on that log
without a word. What could I say? I
realized that I had conspired to put a
fourteen-year-old under a spotlight to
talk about the recent death of a loved
one. Clearly, I had made the single
worst mistake of my career. My perspective as a teacher—obsessed with
good writing, proud of my student’s
well wrought work—suddenly
seemed small and callous. Would I
ever ask my own child to do that?
(continued on next page)
19
Teacher Network
Karina: A Personal
Perspective . . .
(continued from previous page)
How had I decided that this kind of
public exposure would be a good
thing for such a shy and talented
young woman? It was Karina who
broke the silence as I handed her a
Kleenex and reached awkwardly to
touch her shoulder. “They didn’t get
it. They didn’t get any of it.”
“What?”
“They didn’t understand a word I
was saying.”
“Oh, my God, Karina!” Now it
was my turn for tears as I spontaneously embraced her. “If you don’t
think . . . Karina, I’ve never been in a
room where a story did that to people.
They get it. They can’t possibly forget
what they heard tonight.”
Karina looked up in genuine surprise. Silence again.
“So what do you want to do?” I
asked. The question was as much an
address to myself as it was to Karina.
“I can’t walk away, but I can’t go
back in there.” Silence.
My dilemma was genuine enough,
whether to push her to save face and
go back and finish her piece or to
avoid the risk of further vulnerability.
I don’t think I logically resolved the
situation before the words started
coming out of my mouth.
“Look, remember that poem I
asked you to help me revise last
week? I’ve been trying to get up the
guts to read it. Would you at least
come up to the microphone with me,
while I read?”
No response.
“Please?”
A frown, a wipe of her eyes with
the back of her wrist, a momentary
smile, a nod, and we walked back in.
A half-hour later, after I had read,
Karina decided to try again, and she
took over the room with her story.
This time she made it all the way
through, stopping occasionally to
steady her breathing but carrying herself forward with some of the same
20
determination she displayed on the
basketball court, where she was a
young team leader.
In the long applause that followed,
I didn’t notice that Karina had left.
Immediately after the coffeehouse,
several adults asked me to pass on
their praise to Karina, saying they had
never heard writing like that from a
high schooler. A reporter from the
Anchorage Daily News who happened
to be in town approached me and
asked if I would put her in touch with
Karina so that she might publish the
piece. When I called Karina at home
to tell her about all of the audience’s
comments, she was pleased, but when
I mentioned the Daily News person,
she interrupted.
“Mr. McKenna?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll think about it. But is it okay if
we don’t talk about this piece for a
while?”
Recoiling from my enthusiasm, I
realized I was doing it again. “Of
course. How do you feel? I mean, am
I pushing you too hard?”
“No, but I’d really like to spend
some time with my boyfriend.”
W
hen I recall these events, I
do so with the false perspective of memory.
Karina’s emotional response could
have been at least slightly different
from how I remember it. It may have
been a more painful experience than
I’m able to recall, or it may have been
more of a breakthrough, a significant
moment of growth. It was certainly an
important moment of growth for me
as a teacher as I came to identify this
most risky yet potentially productive
edge of my teaching. In our zeal to
see that students excel in their writing, how do we negotiate the boundaries between our students’ private
lives and the public selves that we’re
asking them to construct through their
writing? For me, this is still a twilight
area, one that I may approach with
ever more uncertainty. My memory of
Karina, however, encourages me to
push on and cautiously explore.
Since teaching Karina, I must admit that I’ve had mixed successes
with establishing the culture of support and individual attention that I
believe functioned well enough to allow us to take these risks together,
and well enough to allow these standards for sophisticated thinking to
become the preconditions for almost
everything we would do. (In my most
recent high school English teaching
experience, I had as many as 180 students during the year, with one “advanced” class near or above forty for
the entire year.)
Much of the concern in policymaking circles in Alaska is now understandably centered on the outcome
of high stakes assessments, especially
in rural districts. Although the standards may be moving us in some
ways closer, we haven’t yet arrived at
an adequate common language of
standards that articulates and values
the kind of growth I observed in
Karina or myself in this example.
Clearly, teaching with standards as
ongoing principles for sophisticated
thinking is an intensive and interactive endeavor. I’m realistic enough to
understand constraints on school budgets, but I think it is crucial for us to
consider at what point our priority for
the “most-bang-for-the-buck” accountability might have the unintended consequence of promoting
teaching geared to standards more
than to adolescents—those complex,
emotional, entirely capable, and wonderfully unpredictable learners. ❦
Tom McKenna is a language arts and technology
teacher currently living in
Juneau, Alaska, and
working at the University
of Alaska Southeast. He
has taught for eleven years
in rural and urban Alaska
as well as Barcelona,
Spain. Tom received an
M.A. from the Bread Loaf
School of English in 1996.
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
Of Bombs, Blackness, and Beautiful Music
Will Marinell
The Baldwin School
Philadelphia PA
with Lou Bernieri
Phillips Academy
Andover MA
D
uring the 1999-2000 school
year, through a partnership
between Phillips Academy,
Andover, and the Aga Khan Education Service, I had the unique opportunity to teach at schools in Kenya
and Bangladesh. My main objective
was to heighten cultural awareness by
linking classrooms in the Aga Khan
network with those at Andover via
electronic writing exchanges about
culture and country. To prepare for
launching these exchanges, I attended
the Andover Bread Loaf (ABL) Writing Workshop the summer before my
departure. I knew from conversations
with ABL Director Lou Bernieri that
the program stressed the importance
of writing for and about one’s community, and that many teachers in the
greater Bread Loaf community were
already conducting successful electronic writing exchanges. During an
electronic project workshop at Bread
Loaf in Vermont, Lou and I outlined
the curriculum for a poetry exchange
between students at Andover and in
Kenya. Though we were enthusiastic
about the exchange’s potential, neither of us anticipated the impact it
would have on our students or us.
This exchange, and a subsequent
one we launched between our classes
at Andover and in Bangladesh, inspired us to place the teaching of cultural awareness and the creation of
writing communities at the top of our
lists of educational priorities. We
worry that, because of their flexible
curricular nature, electronic writing
exchanges will be overlooked in our
education system’s push to create a
set of easily replicable, universal standards. By highlighting some of the
powerful moments of our first exchange, we hope to illustrate the extent to which these projects can stimulate creative writing and critical thinking, and to offer persuasive testimony
for making electronic exchanges a
curricular priority in many educational settings.
Our first exchange between students in Nairobi and Andover was
divided into three two-week units:
African poetry, African American poetry, and poetry writing by the students themselves. Prior to the exchange, students from both schools
expressed a fear and dislike of poetry.
Prior to the project, I had even written
to Lou that my senior class was a “notorious poetry-hating class.”
In an attempt to improve students’
attitudes toward poetry, we facilitated
writing exercises that encouraged students to take personal risks in their
writing and to view poetry as a flex-
I am going to tell you something that I’ve always felt but
never really discussed out loud…
When I read the poem, I was astonished at how it sounded as if an
extremely honest and perceptive
Jamaican could have written it
about Jamaica. The painful reality
about my homeland is that the
mindset of slavery and colonial
days has endured long after emancipation and independence. . . .
Our endemic inferiority complex
is Jamaica’s “chronic disease.” I
Will Marinell
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
ible, liberating genre rather than a
pretentious, rigid one. The cross-cultural writing context encouraged surprising changes in attitudes. In an
early exchange, Ruhila (Nairobi) expressed to Cynthia (Andover) the sentiments of students in both countries:
“There was a time when I couldn’t
stand poetry, but now I love it!”
Though it would be flattering to
conclude that brilliant teaching was
responsible for Ruhila’s change of
heart, another single ingredient, empowerment, was the cause. Long-conditioned to learning through dated
British text syllabi and playing the
role of passive, knowledge-absorbing
students, the Kenyan pupils were
thrilled with the chance to read and
write about Africa and their own
lives. On both ends, students were
motivated by the fact that their audience was a group of peers on a distant
continent.
Our unit on African poetry brought
interesting reactions from both sides.
Students were fascinated by how
similar the racial issues in Africa and
America were. The African poem,
“Song Of Ocol” by Okot p’Bitek,
brought the most powerful responses.
Jamaican exchange student Katrina
(Andover) was particularly moved by
Ocol’s position. She wrote:
(continued on next page)
21
Teacher Network
Of Bombs . . .
(continued from previous page)
believe we, as a people, need to
overcome this battle first before
we can develop as a nation.
It was apparent that students were
learning from each other and taking a
vested interest in the curriculum, confirming what we suspected: powerful
learning occurs when students read
and write about subjects that have relevance to their lives and when they
write for a genuine audience.
Throughout the exchange, many of
the participants discovered and revealed important political, personal,
and cultural sentiments for the first
time in their lives. While this phenomenon can result from traditional
pedagogy, the intimacy of the exchange catalyzed more breakthroughs
than we had previously witnessed in
our classrooms.
The third exchange from the
Kenyan students brought a surprise:
they included a poem about the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi.
Aailia (Nairobi) wrote to Jennifer
(Andover):
“In Memory of the Bomb
Blast” expresses the feeling the
entire nation had toward the horrific incident. . . . The lines that I
found most touching were “With
open arms and smiles we welcome
you all, but with your arms you
kill and mutilate us.” The Kenyans
were welcoming “with open arms”
but the others used their “arms” to
destroy our country. . . . “Why
bring your wars to us?” was the
bitter question on every Kenyan’s
mind, as many lost loved ones and
even those who did not felt the
sorrow.
The Americans had to research the
tragedy, for only a few of them even
vaguely remembered it. The African
students’ “takeover” of the project
through the “In Memory of the Bomb
Blast” poem stimulated the exchange.
In addition to learning about the effect
22
of the bombing on the Kenyans, it
prompted the American students to
think critically about the biases of the
U.S. media’s coverage.
The exchange was in full flight by
the fourth week, when the students
began studying the African American
poems. The Kenyans were pleasantly
surprised at the number of poems that
celebrated Africa. Nicholas (Nairobi)
wrote to Chris (Andover), “I guess
this is a common element in many of
these African American poems—the
praising of Africa’s physical splendor—I guess I’m proud of it myself!”
Nicholas’s sentiments were echoed by
a number of the Kenyans; they did not
know how important Africa and its
culture were to African Americans.
The Kenyans’ ability to relate to
the African American poems intrigued their U.S. counterparts. While
slavery was a foreign notion to the
Kenyans, the reality of oppression
still resonated from the days of colonialism. James (Nairobi) wrote to Teri
(Andover) about Langston Hughes’s
poem “Democracy”:
The fact that people are ignorant bores the poet when he writes,
“I tire so. . . .” The poet is angered
at the people’s passiveness. I find
it interesting that the behavior of
some Black Negroes in America is
almost exactly the same as the average citizen in Kenya. It’s the attitude of why fight a system that
cannot be defeated? Why fight
corruption if all are corrupt? Why
risk your head today when you can
survive like this for years? This
attitude bored the poet just like it
bores me. This attitude cannot be
termed “passive resistance” but
active acceptance of existing evils
in society.
Throughout the exchange, and particularly in the final weeks, students
were encouraged to share original
work. It was perhaps these passages,
the ones that depicted personal or cultural revelation, that were the most
exceptional. Witness this letter from
Vivienne (Nairobi) to Tiffany
(Andover):
Dear Tiffany,
I must say that I enjoyed this
project so much. It helped me
quite a lot. . . . Last February, I
happened to lose my dad and it
really broke my heart. When Mr.
Marinell asked me to write a poem
about my sacred place, I wrote
about my balcony. It was the place
I used to sit with my dad and have
chats. So when it was my turn to
read out my poem, I did but could
not finish because I broke out in
tears. Since that day, I have never
felt the same. . . . My point is that
poetry has been a healing tool for
me because it helps me express
feelings the easy way. I would like
to share this poem with you:
THE BALCONY
An ideal place to sit and relax
Most of all it is my meditation
spot
Reminds me of all the times I
shared with my dad
A place where we could sit,
talk
And have some dad-daughter
gossip
This is before the cruel hand of
death
Took him away from me
Never to see him again.
Now it is not only a meditation
spot
But a mourning spot too
So every time I feel like I miss
him and feel low
I go to that sacred spot.
—Vivienne
Though we’d traced the progress
of our students’ writing and critical
thinking over the course of the term, it
wasn’t until the end of the project,
when we asked the students to evaluate the exchange, that we were able to
truly measure its impact on them.
Ruhila’s comments illustrate the profound experience the exchange offered her:
I’d never taken African poetry
seriously before. . . . We used to
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
always read Robert Frost . . . never
any African poetry. I realized African poetry really is good. I’ve
started liking my country better
after this exchange. I used to hate
this country!
Though this type of learning through
creative discourse and negotiation cannot
be easily packaged and marketed by educational
boards, we think it an essential part of a
school’s curriculum.
—Ruhila
Perhaps this excerpt of a conversation between Muhammed and James
(Nairobi) best illustrates the attainment of our project’s ultimate objective, that of heightened cultural sensitivity:
Muhammed: When you start
bridging gaps and educating
people from each side as to how
people on the other side think,
function, believe, it’ll help bring
us together and stop all the discrimination and heighten our
awareness to the real problems
that are going on.
James: (long pause) I think discrimination can be reduced. I don’t
think it will ever end. They say
that the world is getting smaller;
people are learning more about
each other, but people don’t have
to like each other. In this exchange
we’ve learned about the Americans, more about how their society
functions. Even with the increase
in communication, it doesn’t signify that people will start accepting each other, but I think it’s
within our capability. If everyone
were to judge one another by their
character . . . the goal of ending
discrimination is to get people to
look at your character, not just
your color. I think the solution is
time.
Muhammed: And education!
Having never attempted this type
of project before, neither Lou nor I
could have predicted the extent to
which cultural, political, and personal
revelations were possible. Among
other things, our students reminded us
of their capacity to learn independently and from each other, and that
an instructor’s role is composed of
equal parts of instruction, inspiration,
and organization. In reality, though
Lou and I offered students technical
poetry lessons (we discussed style,
rhyme, rhythm, meter, imagery, etc.)
and feedback on their work, the students themselves ultimately created
the language that made the discussion
of culture possible. We merely allowed the dialogue to happen. Though
this type of learning through creative
discourse and negotiation cannot be
easily packaged and marketed by educational boards, we think it an essential part of a school’s curriculum.
The exchange has taught us that
technical precision, expression, and
critical thinking need not be taught
solely from textbooks in isolated contexts; in fact, language skills are best
learned in highly social contexts
where risk-taking is appreciated and
there are multiple opportunities for
students to enter into an intense flow
of communication. Likewise, cultural
awareness and tolerance cannot be
taught in isolation from others who
are different from us but are best
achieved through dialogue among a
diverse variety of peers. Though the
students’ poetry writing on both ends
improved in a technical sense, what
they gained from embracing writing
as a tool for expression is not easily
quantifiable and may not turn up on
standardized multiple-choice tests. It
is real, however, and worthy of being
a priority in education. ❦
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
Since graduating from
Amherst College in 1996
with a degree in English,
Will Marinell has taught
literature and creative
writing and worked in
the independent film
business. Most recently,
he spent a year teaching
English in Kenya and
Bangladesh, experimenting with international
electronic writing exchanges.
Lou Bernieri, a 1980
Bread Loaf alumnus, is
the director of the
Andover Bread Loaf
Writing Workshop and is
a moderator of the Bread
Loaf City Teacher
Network. He is also a
teacher and coach at
Phillips Academy,
Andover.
23
Teacher Network
What Is Good Writing? Standard Deviation
Jason B. Leclaire
Bradford High School
Bradford OH
A Frustrated Student
I
was not surprised to see Ellen grimace in the hallway before school.
Nor was I surprised when she
rubbed her temples and told me she had
a terrible headache and an upset stomach. A couple of hours later Ellen ran
up to me smiling and relaxed and exclaimed, “It’s over!” She was relieved;
she had just finished her most recent
attempt to pass Ohio’s ninth grade writing proficiency test.
Ellen is a senior at Bradford High
School. She has taken the writing proficiency several times but has never
scored high enough to pass. Three
times she has missed the cutoff by one
half of a point (I’ve changed her name
to protect her privacy). It’s not that
Ellen has failed to prepare herself for
the test. It’s not because of an inability
to write well enough. She can. The
week before the most recent test, Ellen
wrote in response to the practice
prompt: “Tell about a time when something went wrong and you learned from
it. Be sure to include specific details
and tell what you learned.” Her introduction began:
It was a nice day up till the cops
were knocking on my door. I was at
my house with a friend of mine. Everything was going fine. Then she
asked for something to drink. I said,
“Sure, get something out of the
fridge.” Instead, she got on top of
the fridge and got into my mom’s
alcohol. From then on, the day went
downhill.
This brief glimpse of Ellen’s work
illustrates her proficiency as a writer,
even according to state standards for
the ninth grade proficiency test. As
listed in “A Resource Manual for
Teachers of Writing,” a piece of writ-
24
ing earning the highest score is one that
focuses on the topic with ample supporting details arranged in logical order,
demonstrates solid development of content from introduction to conclusion,
shows a mature command of language,
and contains correct sentence structure
with rare exceptions (9).
Ellen does all these things. She has a
compelling opening, one that clearly
focuses on the topic and engages a
reader. She illustrates an acceptable
command of language and sentence
structure, if not extensive variety. She
makes a nice transition from the “hook”
into the body of her narrative. She also
uses a fairly complex overall structure
by framing her story with the arrival of
the police. Yes, there are shortcomings
in the piece. She punctuated dialogue
incorrectly. And she could have more
fully developed the scene with specific
details. However, she has demonstrated
clear proficiency in most important areas.
Yet, even with the ability to write at
an acceptable level, Ellen has not
passed the actual proficiency test. The
problem is the pressure. It’s a high
stakes test, and Ellen knows she won’t
get a diploma if she doesn’t pass. She
can write when relaxed. But the anxiety
of taking the test causes her to freeze.
To date, Ellen has been unable to produce the same level of writing during
the real exam; she’s so terrified of failing and not graduating that she tries to
write what she thinks the judges want to
hear. So inevitably, nerve-driven headaches and nausea cause her to write
stilted, flawed pieces, which keep her
from demonstrating her true capability.
Ellen is caught in a cycle perpetuated
by the pressure of a high-stakes test; she
is trying too hard to write to “their”
standards.
A Frustrated Teacher
Ellen’s story is not all that different
from my own; my sense of identity as a
teacher is under the same kind of pressure. Every time my students go to the
cafeteria to take the writing test, I develop a headache and an upset stomach
because I fear my reputation as a teacher
will be determined solely by my students’ performance. If they do well, my
beliefs and methods are validated. I’m
doing a good job. If they do poorly, I
must be a poor teacher.
Especially in my first year of teaching, I wasn’t prepared to handle this kind
of pressure. I tried in vain to avoid it by
devaluing the test itself. I claimed the
test didn’t measure what really mattered
in writing: voice, power, purpose. I referred to writing gurus like Donald
Murray, who says, “The student must be
given four freedoms—the freedom to
find his own subject, to find his own evidence, to find his own audience, and to
find his own form” (142). The proficiency test gave students two and onehalf hours to respond to two prompts. No
freedom there. Moreover, the topic they
were to write on had been decided by the
test makers. The student could find her
own evidence, but the subject, form, and
audience were often already determined.
I lauded Linda Rief, who once threw out
her school district’s standardized test
and “vowed [she] would never allow a
test like that in [her] classroom” (121). I
rationalized to take the heat off.
Unfortunately, my students suffered
when I had that attitude. They mirrored
my negativity and didn’t try to excel on
the test. Many of them failed. Dismissing the proficiency test, I realized, was a
disservice to students. So I switched tactics and went to the other extreme: overpreparation and teaching to the test.
The following year my students spent
months preparing to write for the proficiency. We wrote neat, five-paragraph
essays (with three supporting details, one
in each paragraph) over and over just so
they could pass the test. Ninety-seven
percent of them did. But in the process,
they stopped enjoying writing, and many
of them wrote lifeless pieces that were
grammatically accurate and informative
but entirely uninteresting. By the end of
the year, several students had written
variations of an explanatory essay titled
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
“Why I Don’t Like Writing.” They all
had five paragraphs and three reasons.
I had to find a better way.
Listening to a Student
In the end, a student of mine revealed the answer I needed. Paul
Smith, a fourteen-year-old eighth
grader wrote a short essay called “I’m
Not a Writer” for his year-end portfolio. He used it to show he could write
persuasively, and when I first saw the
title I couldn’t help thinking, “Here we
go again . . . another ‘writing stinks’
piece.” But I was surprised. Writing
stunk, all right, but it wasn’t just another piece. Paul wrote:
tions for writing well. For that reason
alone it’s a remarkable piece. As always, there is room for improvement.
But it’s got fire. And it definitely convinces me that Paul is a writer even
though he doesn’t feel like one when
he’s writing the five-paragraph essay.
As I considered how to grade the
essay, it occurred to me that Paul had
written a piece that both defied expectations and met them. He wrote in a
different way than I expected. But he
showed his writing had the characteristics I was looking for, and they were
the same traits scored on the proficiency test: focus on topic, organization, development and support of ideas,
I’m not a writer and I
never will become a writer. I
despise writing but I’m still
forced to do so. The reason
why I’m not a writer is: horrible handwriting, crippling
writer’s block, bad story telling. I don’t know how writing
will help me in my career as a
secret arms designer for the
government or a person who
designs nuclear fusion reacJason Leclaire and Bradford High students
tors. Sure, fusion hasn’t been
invented yet, but I’ll be in
college until I’m 30! So it should be mechanics. What’s more, the correlaout by then.
tion between Paul’s expressive writing
and the state standards will be even
Now please explain to me how
closer when Ohio institutes its newest
writing will help my career. I might
version of the proficiency, the High
have to write a report on fission reSchool Graduation Qualifying Examiactors, but I’m pretty sure how to
nation (HSGQE). The HSGQE will go
do that. You just drag out three
into effect in two years and will be
small, one-word details and turn
judged on the same criteria as the curthem into a paragraph.
rent test with two additional categories:
voice and audience consideration (55).
Clever! Paul expressed his dislike
Given Paul’s ability as a writer, he
for formulaic writing and poked fun at
would pass with flying colors.
having to give three predictable details
The best part about reading Paul’s
in the five-paragraph essay format. At
piece was that I finally realized the difthe same time, he proved he was a
ficulty that my students and I had with
playful and compelling writer. Paul’s
the proficiency test. It had nothing to
voice had passion; only he could have
do with what the test evaluated; after
written this piece. In essence, Paul was
all, I was already looking for the same
saying to me, “Forget what you want
characteristics that the test was. It was
me to write. I’m going to say what I
the pressure of the high stakes test, the
want!” He was implicitly expressing
doubt that teaching to the test raises in
his need for the freedoms that Don
the minds of students and their teacher.
Murray identifies as necessary condi-
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
But seeing Paul defy convention
while still proving himself an apt
writer reminds me I don’t have to
teach to the test. If I teach writing
based on sound principles like those
of Donald Murray, Peter Elbow, and
Nancie Atwell, the standards will
take care of themselves. That’s the
message I need to remember and
send to my students. If you learn to
write well, the proficiency test is not
a problem. And if Ellen doesn’t pass
her test this time around, this is
where we’ll start the next time: write
well what you know instead of trying
to write what someone else wants
you to say. ❦
Works Cited
An Information Guide for the
Ohio High School Graduation Qualifying Examinations. Ohio Department of
Education, 2000.
A Resource Manual for Teachers
of Writing. Ohio Department of Education, 1993.
Murray, Donald. Learning by
Teaching. Montclair, New
Jersey: Boynton/Cook, 1982.
Rief, Linda. Seeking Diversity.
Portsmouth: Heinemann,
1992.
Jason Leclaire has been
teaching English for four
years at a combined
middle school/high
school in rural Ohio. He
graduated from Miami
University with a B.S. in
Education and has
presented workshops for
the Ohio Writing Project
during the past two
years. He has been an
Ohio-Rise Fellow at
Bread Loaf for two
summers.
25
Teacher Network
Listening to Voices: Integrating Standards
and Culturally Relevant Content
Maria Offer
Angoon School
Angoon AK
Editorial Note: A version of this article first appeared in Standard Implications published in 2000 by the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau.
I
sit at a cafeteria table chatting
with a group of parents at the language arts open house that I am
hosting. My plan is to get the school
year at Tukurngailnguq School off to
a great start, so I invite parents to a
meeting and ask for their input. I have
a flip chart and different colored
markers ready so I can write down
ideas as they come up. One student’s
father voices his interest in community and school news written by students, so I write “School Newspaper”
on the flip chart. Another parent expresses her idea of having students
write the history of the dance traditions of this Yup’ik village on Norton
Sound. I listen to their suggestions
about which elders can share their
knowledge of the local dance traditions and about who can translate
what they know into English. We
munch on cookies and cake baked by
the seventh graders and sip coffee, but
it is the parents’ ideas, which reflect
the needs and priorities of the community, that I hunger for.
To spark further ideas from parents, I have displayed the books I read
in a Native American Literature class
that I took last summer. I listen to the
comments from parents as they
browse. Much attention is given to
Two Old Women (HarperPerennial
Library, 1994) by Velma Wallis, a
Native Alaskan from Fort Yukon, an
Athabascan village at the confluence
of the Yukon and Porcupine Rivers,
far inland from where we are now.
Gladys Pete, the mother of four
26
middle school and high school students, tells us how she enjoyed reading the book, and how clearly it describes the lives of the people in that
region before contact with Russians
and Europeans. Gladys also tells stories I have not heard, about how
women in this village survived similar
experiences through times of famine
and cold. The lives of people here on
the coast differed from the Athabascans, but similar stories about women
of great strength who survived harsh
winters and sometimes abandonment
are known here. Gladys believes that
by reading Two Old Women students
will be able to see through the eyes of
the people who lived a long time ago
and know the struggles and sacrifices
they endured. Through comparisons
of the challenges of present day life
with those of an earlier time, she
hopes students will develop a perspective that will help them when faced
with difficulties in their lives.
O
ne of the most positive additions to my teaching came
from these ideas that parents
shared with me at my first open house
at school. Not only did I learn from
the parents but they learned that I was
open to their ideas and suggestions,
and that I was interested in making
learning relevant for their children.
Encouraged by Gladys’s suggestions,
I offered the book Two Old Women as
one of the four choices for reading
circles in my seventh and eighth grade
language arts class later that fall. I
like to have students reading books of
choice in small structured groups, as
Harvey Daniels describes in his book
Literature Circles, Voice and Choice
in the Student-Centered Classroom
(Statehouse Publishers, 1994). I use
five of the roles described by Daniels,
including Literary Luminary, Illustrator, Character Captain, Connector and
Vocabulary Enricher. My students
request reading circles with a cheer-
Maria Offer enjoying time with five-year-old Pauline Waskey
at the Waskeys’ fish camp on the Yukon River.
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
fulness and yearning in their voices,
aided their survival. Feelings were
mother of Shru Zhuu and the daughter
something a novice English teacher
reflected on the artists’ faces as they
of Ch’idzigyaak. Bryon was Daagoo
loves to hear. Even those students
drew, and I noticed a sense of deterand Steven became the chief. Emily
who have been reluctant readers in
mination and pride as they finished
and Jacinta became Sa’ and
other activities ask for reading circles.
their work.
Ch’idzigyaak, surviving not only the
So I try to listen carefully to these
Impressed with their drawings and
harsh winter and sparse game, but
voices and reflect on what they are
the connections they were making, I
their feelings of loneliness and abantelling me.
suggested to a couple of students that
donment as well.
The five students who chose to
they look at some of the conversations
Students were excited about recreread Two Old Women formed an enin the story and dramatize a section of
ating the scenes from the book. They
thusiastic reading circle. As I assigned
dialogue. Students began discussing
wanted to share the story with others
them roles, I mentally assessed the
passages at the end of the book, which
and chose to perform it for the first
skills and interests of the students. I
are packed with powerful emotions of
and second graders, whom they tuasked Jacinta if she wanted to be the
love, fear, and the remorse that The
tored on a weekly basis. They carried
Illustrator, and she raised her eyePeople felt for leaving the two women
their props, which they made from
brows (a nonverbal affirmative sign
behind. Shana created a new role as
classroom materials, and the classthat is very common in the region).
“Playwright” and began to type an
room podium for Shana to use as she
She was soon engrossed in recreating
introduction to a play. A couple of
narrated the play, down the hall and
scenes from the book. She drew two
students helped and soon they had
performed the play for the younger
women building their house with a
turned the last two chapters of the
students and their teachers. They later
wooden framework covered by caribook into a piece of drama. The
performed their interpretation of Two
bou skins. Jacinta
Old Women for parents
drew another picture
and other family memof the women holding
bers.
spears to keep The
Reflecting back on
People who abanthis activity, I believe
doned them away
the format of the reading
from their camp and
circles led to successful
their food caches.
learning experiences beWhen the other
cause it combined indestudents were finished
pendent reading stratewith the assignments
gies and cooperative
on their role sheets,
learning. Another crucial
they also became inelement that added to its
volved in drawing
success was my giving
pictures. Emily drew
students additional time
the women cutting
for artwork and drama.
salmon and drying
Through this creative
As part of Maria Offer’s literature unit,
them on racks. I knew
experience, I hope these
Yup’ik students sketched Ch’idzigyaak and her grandson,
Emily loved fish
students will continue to
characters from Two Old Women.
camp and helping her
see reading not only as a
mom cut and dry salmon for winter,
whole class was involved, and I depleasurable activity but also as one
as it is the subject of much of her
cided to extend the project for a few
that will enrich their lives in many
writing. As students drew, I could see
more days.
ways. Through their drama and artthey were connecting the scenes from
Rather than assign character roles
work, they not only connected with
the book with their own personal exto each student, I let the reading circle
literature, but also bonded with each
periences with subsistence activities
decide how to assign characters in
other and their past in new ways.
in a subarctic environment, and also
their play to their fellow classmates. I
In order for this project to be a
with their innermost feelings and
had already realized that these twelvesuccessful learning activity, I felt it
painful emotions. In their drawings, I
and thirteen-year-olds, who have
was important to give my students the
saw loneliness, anger, fear, and hurt
grown up together, know each other
freedom to make some of the decifrom abandonment. The scenes they
well, and could assign roles better
sions. My job was to provide guiddepicted were of defining moments,
matched to their individual personaliance and support within the organized
when characters moved from their
ties than I could as a relative newfeelings of loss and began to tap into
comer. Brent became Shru Zhuu, the
their inner strength, and when the
grandson of Ch’idzigyaak. Rufina
(continued on next page)
memory of hunting and fishing skills
played the important character of the
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
27
Teacher Network
Listening to Voices . . .
(continued from previous page)
framework I had developed. I allowed
time for student input and freedom for
them to follow their own directions to
meet their individual goals. Student
creativity blossomed as they became
immersed in the project and made
connections to their own lives, their
village, and the forces of nature in a
northern climate. I did not tell the students that Two Old Women was recommended by parents, but I think
they, like their parents, are in tune
with the values and priorities of the
community, more than I may ever be.
I will continue listening to the voices
of parents and others in the community, as their student. I need to hear
what they say, and share their knowledge within the school setting, so that
education can be an interactive process.
T
he challenge for me in my role
as teacher in this village has
been to connect all that I
learned from parents to lessons and
projects rooted in the Alaska State
Maria Offer is working
toward a master’s at
Bread Loaf. She has
taught adult education
and has spent two years
teaching high school
language arts in Yup’ik
villages. Maria says,
“Teaching in a village
offers many challenges
and rewards. Students
are very knowledgeable
about their culture and
subsistence skills in
their unique environment, and they are
willing to share this
knowledge.”
28
Content Standards. In the end, this
one that she enjoyed, was stronger
was not overly difficult. In fact, with
than her timidity in the end.
this particular project, by incorporatI am glad I invited the parents to
ing both parents’ and students’ ideas
come and share their ideas with me. I
and directions, I addressed additional
plan on inviting the community to
English language arts standards beanother “language arts open house,”
yond those I had originally designed it
and I will continue to listen on a daily
to address, namely, Standards A and
basis to what parents and students are
B: “A student should be able to speak
saying. Sometimes what I learn is
and write well for a variety of purgleaned from these formal, arranged
poses and audiences” and “A student
meetings with parents at school. Most
should be a competent and thoughtful
often, though, my learning is part of
reader, listener, and viewer of literadaily life. I meet parents at the store,
ture, technical materials, and a variety
the post office, in their homes, and
of other information.” With
student input we were also
able to address Standard A6
and Standard B3: “When appropriate, use visual techThe challenge for me in this
niques to communicate ideas;
village has been to connect
these techniques may include
role playing, body language,
all that I learned from
mime, sign language, graphparents to lessons and
ics, Braille, art, and dance”
and “Relate what the student
projects rooted in the Alaska
views, reads, and hears to
State Content Standards.
practical purposes in the
student’s own life, to the
world outside, and to other
texts and experiences.” Because I gave the students rewalking along the village roads. I join
sponsibility in developing the play,
in village subsistence activities such
they also demonstrated Standard C:
as picking berries, setting salmon
“A student should be able to identify
nets, and walking to the beach to oband select from multiple strategies in
serve the community activity when a
order to complete projects indepenhunter has killed a whale. I watch as
dently and cooperatively.”
children play string games and listen
From the beginning, the reading
to the stories that go along with these
circles met the social needs of these
games. I travel by boat to fish camp,
Yup’ik middle school children. As
eat seal meat cooked over an open
they performed the play for other
fire, and gather aiyuk for tea. I listen
classes and their families, they developed valuable speaking skills. I tried
to stories at the community hall and
to provide many and varied opportuwatch the traditions of the Giveaway
and the First Dance during the winter
nities for verbal expression, so all stupotlatch. The more I live in the vildents would develop confidence and
lage, the more I learn. What is imporskill in speaking in front of others.
For example, a student who was chotant, I feel, is maintaining openness
sen for one of the leading roles in the
and respect for the ideas of this community that I call home. ❦
play appeared to be very shy. I think
her peers chose her for the lead because her inner strength complemented the personality of one of the
book’s main characters. If she was
nervous about speaking in public, her
determination to share a good story,
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
Bread Loaf in the Cities
Lou Bernieri
Phillips Academy
Andover MA
Hazel Lockett
Clifford J. Scott High School
East Orange NJ
I
n June, 2000, Bread Loaf invited
thirteen urban teachers to attend
Bread Loaf and initiate the Bread
Loaf City Teacher Network
(BLCTN). The thirteen urban Fellows
attended the Bread Loaf Vermont and
New Mexico campuses. These teachers were supported by generous grants
from Middlebury College (eight
teachers), the Plan for Social Excellence, Inc. (four teachers), and a
Middlebury alumnus (one teacher).
BLCTN’s moderators are Hazel
Lockett and Lou Bernieri.
In his letter to BLCTN teachers,
Jim Maddox stated, “Our immediate
goal is to forge unity among the thirteen teachers in Vermont and New
Mexico so you will all have a common sense of what you will be doing
when you go back to your classrooms.” In typical Bread Loaf fashion, the thirteen teachers not only met
but exceeded this goal. Through
BLCTN meetings in Vermont and
New Mexico, the urban teachers solidified the network among themselves and began developing a vision
that will define and guide it in the
next few years.
Although BLCTN is an integral
part of BLTN, one of the first discussions in the BLCTN meetings focused
on defining “urban,” specifically in
regard to the differences between urban education and rural education.
While it may be true that urban and
rural public education have more
similarities than differences, there are
several things that distinguish the urban setting from the rural one. As Jim
Randels and Lisa Richardson (New
Orleans) pointed out at the conference preceding the 2000 summer session in Vermont, the density of population and availability of community
resources (libraries, museums, businesses, community organizations)
offer urban teachers and students
partnership opportunities that may
not be available in rural settings. Rich
Gorham (Lawrence, MA) noted that
the multiplicity of languages and
ethnicities in urban schools is another
resource available to urban teachers
that is not often available to rural
ones. Interestingly, density of population and ethnic and linguistic diversity are often seen as disadvantages in
urban education. Clearly, BLCTN
teachers share an educational vision
that could influence other urban educators and policy makers. Perhaps
one early goal of BLCTN should be
to articulate this vision and the educational practices that emerge from it.
In order to get a sense of the urban
areas and populations in BLCTN, the
urban Fellows generated separate student and teacher surveys to gather
data. These surveys were distributed
and collected during the school year
and will be examined by a team of
teachers at Bread Loaf in the summer
of 2001.
The most important work of
BLCTN teachers during the summer
of 2000 was the working partnerships
they created. These partnerships took
the form of planned classroom collaborations among themselves and
between BLCTN and other BLTN
teachers, both nationally and internationally. In addition, BLCTN teachers
created their own teacher research
conferences (such as the one on
teaching English as a second language, which was led by Betsy
Kimball from Lawrence, MA). The
teacher collaborations are clearly at
the heart of the network, for the urban
Fellows agreed that classroom tele-
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
communications projects and teacher
research should drive BLCTN as they
drive BLTN.
In their meetings and network conversations, the urban Fellows are already learning as much as possible
about each other through BreadNet
communication and site visits. The
overarching aim that Jim Maddox detailed in a letter to BLCTN participants is to obtain adequate funding to
support periodic meetings and the expansion of BLCTN to several cities,
with two to three school sites per city.
One particular advantage BLCTN
has as it begins to define itself and its
work is that it has two major sites
where networks within the network
already exist. In New Orleans, Jim
Randels and Lisa Richardson have
been directing a remarkable and inspiring project, Students at the Center,
which began at one school and is
slowly spreading to others in the city.
In Lawrence, MA, Mary Guerrero,
Betsy Kimball, Rich Gorham, Hazel
Lockett, and Lou Bernieri have been
directing the Andover Bread Loaf program, a professional development network with members in every school in
Lawrence. These two sites offer model
projects and curricula for BLCTN participants to build upon.
In an open letter to other Bread
Loaf urban teachers, Jim Randels
noted that promoting democratic education in urban schools is a primary
goal, and the process of reaching it
will be “long-term and cumulative.”
Discussions on this topic will be of
central importance at our continuing
conferences and meetings. Like all
BLTN teachers, the urban Fellows see
themselves as teacher-activists, educators who find it impossible to separate
issues of equality and justice from
teaching and learning. ❦
29
Teacher Network
A Teamwork Approach to Implementing
Curriculum Standards and School Reform
Patricia C. Watson
Kentucky Valley
Education Cooperative
Hazard KY
H
ow close am I?” inquired
Derrick, a seventh grade student, as we compared his
writing selections to the criteria of the
Kentucky Holistic Scoring for Writing. Derrick wanted to meet the “proficient” rating, and through our conference sessions, he knew some revision was needed before his writing
would meet the standards to which we
compared his work.
Like Derrick, many Kentucky students are interested in doing their
best, so they are taking ownership of
their learning, striving to meet clear
expectations established to reach
Kentucky’s “proficient” goal, which
is anticipated for all students by 2014.
Movement toward this goal began in
Patricia Watson at Bread Loaf
in Vermont, 1998
30
1990 with the passing of Kentucky’s
Educational Reform Act (KERA). At
that time, I was teaching high school
senior English. As KERA established
new standards, I was challenged to
teach with specific performance goals
and academic expectations. Fortunately, the demand for change was
accompanied by a commitment from
the state to give teachers the necessary training to help them create
change.
Kentucky’s educational goals and
present standards for learning affect
everyone working in public education.
All Derrick’s teachers, for example,
must engage in ongoing professional
development and continue to create
new teaching strategies to accommodate the diverse learning styles of individual students. Now more than
ever, principals and school leaders are
setting clear expectations for students
and teachers and linking those expectations to defined goals, review
checks, teacher professional growth
plans, and assessment.
With the close of 1999 and the beginning of 2000, Kentucky legislated three levels of scholastic audits to improve teaching and
learning in low-performing
schools. An audit examines students’ academic performance,
a school’s learning environment, and the general efficiency of the school. The term
“audit” was debated heavily
because of the potential negative connotations of the word.
But the word stuck because
leaders wanted schools to understand that the scholastic
audit is serious business
where there is marked academic decline. Being part of a
scholastic audit team, however, can be a very positive
experience, for the work is
characterized by teamwork, cooperation, sharing of information, and sensitivity to stakeholders. As I see it,
Kentucky’s scholastic audit is a tool
to ensure that teaching and learning
occur at high levels. For example,
Standard 2 addresses assessment and
requires teachers to continuously
monitor and change practices as
needed in order to have an impact on
student learning. In other words, instead of waiting for annual state assessment results to tell us how we are
doing, continuous monitoring means
that we will take the responsibility to
examine our own work and immediately implement the changes that are
necessary to improve student learning.
During summers at Bread Loaf, I
learned a great deal about examining
my own pedagogy from professors
Dixie Goswami and JoBeth Allen,
who prompted me to “re-view” my
teaching by examining the work of
my students. I began to understand
how important it is to engage students, who, after all, have the greatest
investment in the activities of the
classroom. I also learned how critical
it is to engage my fellow teachers and
share questions and insights.
Sharing my thoughts, practices,
and beliefs about students as partners
in teaching and learning has been ongoing through email exchanges with
some of my Bread Loaf friends and
colleagues, especially Robert Baroz,
from Middlebury, Vermont. Robert
has engaged his students as enthusiastic classroom researchers with clear
expectations for their role in the work.
Through our continued online discourse, Robert and I share what works
in the classroom. It is interesting to
find similarities between what Robert
is doing in Vermont and what Kentucky teachers are doing. For example, as the current school year was
beginning for Robert (now a principal
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
in a private school), he sent his school
agenda to me via email, outlining a
plan to have his faculty collectively
rewrite the school’s mission statement. This writing project was part of
his faculty’s professional development activity at the beginning of the
to encourage teachers to look at students’ work, especially student writing portfolios. In these analysis sessions, I observe that teachers take
greater interest and make a greater
effort to understand the specific needs
of their students and, usually, establish goals to meet
the needs. When
this happens, my
role is to facilitate
Being part of a scholastic audit
the process and
then to follow up
team, however, can be a very positive
as a resource.
experience, for the work is
Teacher talk is
a powerful tool
characterized by teamwork,
when it is seen as
cooperation, sharing of information,
a necessary ingredient for achieving
and sensitivity to stakeholders.
school-wide
change, whether it
is talk between
two teachers, beschool year. In Kentucky, I had just
tween an administrator and a teacher,
completed a training session with
or between a teacher and a student,
teachers in which we discussed how a
like Derrick. In my work, I observe
mission statement can be used to
that “talk” fosters the sharing of effecunify a faculty and promote collaborative practices and encourages teachers
tive relationships.
to take ownership and make decisions
Since I was last a student at Bread
for appropriate “next steps,” rather
Loaf in the summer of 1998, my job
than depending on others to decide for
title has changed, and the educators I
them. Through such talk we become a
serve have changed, too. I am a memcommunity of learners, accepting the
ber of Kentucky’s Highly Skilled
changes needed to help us teach chilEducators (HSE) program, serving a
dren like Derrick.
two-year term. Educators in the HSE
As I write this article, I have comprogram are carefully selected and
pleted two scholastic audits in two
placed in individual schools, usually
low-performing schools. My team
where assessment scores indicate low
members and I grew very close as we
performance or decline. In my case, I
worked sixteen to eighteen hours a
was placed with an HSE partner in an
day during the week-long process,
experimental pilot program housed at
interviewing stakeholders, observing
the Kentucky Valley Educational Coclassroom teaching and overall school
operative; our goal is to foster leaderoperations, and gathering data. The
ship in a region serving thirteen
work was challenging. We went as
school districts.
professionals with respect for each
We encourage district and school
person whom we interviewed, valuing
leaders to initiate nontraditional protheir knowledge and expertise and
fessional development approaches,
providing them with feedback that
many of which I observed at Bread
would positively affect student learnLoaf: study groups, teacher collaboraing.
tion, development of shared units of
During each audit, we generated
study, professional reading circles via
enough information to fill a document
email, and mentoring relationships
about an inch thick. As I paused for
among teachers. As a result of my
reflection, I realized what a wealth of
Bread Loaf experiences, I have begun
information the scholastic audit docu-
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
ment contains for school improvement. I know how much I had learned
by engaging in the process. In my
opinion, the audit is one of the best
tools we have for looking at our
schools and improving the teaching
and learning.
Such in-depth reviews are a new,
complex and effective procedure, indicating that Kentucky is serious
about meeting standards. Clear rubrics
and other instruments now exist for
assessing our progress. With the initiation of the audits, analysis of findings, and follow-up that’s offered to
the schools, we will see ongoing
school improvement for all students—
for Derrick as well as other eager,
bright children who deserve an education equal to that of any child at any
school in Kentucky. It is up to teachers and other educational leaders to
seize every resource to provide the
highest quality of education for them. ❦
Patricia Watson is
serving a two-year term
as a Highly Skilled
Educator at the Kentucky
Valley Educational
Cooperative at Hazard,
Kentucky, providing
professional development training to teachers
within a region of thirteen school districts.
Upon completing her
HSE term, she will
return to her position in
Floyd County as district
coordinator for writing
and reading. Patricia
attended Bread Loaf as a
Kentucky Department of
Education Fellow.
31
Teacher Network
A Cross-Disciplinary BreadNet Exchange:
Moving beyond the Facts
was to give my students a sense of
Mary Lindenmeyer
Window Rock High School
Fort Defiance AZ
I
n Hard Times, Charles Dickens
describes the exalted status of
facts at the school where Mr.
Gradgrind is schoolmaster: “Everything was fact . . . and what you
couldn’t state in figures was not.” Mr.
Gradgrind, a fact-loving drudge, drills
his students in definitions. One student offers the following factual definition of a horse: “Quadruped.
Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely
twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth
and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in
spring; in marshy countries, sheds
hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring
to be shod with iron. Age known by
marks in mouth.” But when the citybred student sees a horse on the side
of the road one afternoon, he has no
idea what it is. He knows the facts but
can’t put them together. This humorous incident from Dickens’s novel
illustrates a doubt that has haunted my
teaching of history. With confidence,
I know my students can recite historical facts, but do they see the historical
meaning of them? Do they see history
being played out in their lives? Do
they believe their thinking shapes history?
After my first summer at the Bread
Loaf School of English in Vermont, I
eagerly returned to Window Rock
High School in Fort Defiance, Arizona, to test some of these questions.
During the previous year, I had been a
demanding teacher, I believe, sticking
to the textbook and drilling my students on the facts of history. After
Bread Loaf, however, things were going to be different. I planned to use
the textbooks less and instead encourage my students to become critical
thinkers and readers of history
32
ownership of their learning, which
according to Freire would empower
them in choices they make in their
lives.
The greatest challenge was to
convince my students they had to do
more than simply “give back facts”
memorized from the textbook. Accepting this change was difficult for
these advanced students, who had
grown comfortable in “textbookdriven” classes. They weren’t used to
coming up with questions from their
reading whose answers were not in a
textbook. I kept having to assure them
that reading, thinking, writing, and
rewriting were a form of learning.
through reading primary source material and literature.
My intent was to try out the teaching methodology of educational theorist Paolo Freire, and my students
would begin an “inquiry into the social consequences and personal contexts” of history. My hope was for
students to see that history was the act
of a people writing their own unfolding story, not a series of static facts to
be learned for a test. I hoped to facilitate their learning rather than simply
dispense facts. And I hoped my students would engage in the dialogue of
history
through the
study of literature. Little did
I know that
this would be
as much a
challenge for
myself as for
my students.
I remained
firm in my intention to excite and engage my students in history, and I
planned to use
BreadNet as
Mary Lindenmeyer working with students
the vehicle to
at Window Rock High School
explore the
Middle Ages
Being AP students, they all wanted
in a learning exchange with Morgan
A’s. How were they to earn A’s, they
Falkner’s college preparatory literawondered, if I didn’t test them on
ture students in Rio Rico, Arizona,
facts? After much discussion, we
located nine miles from the Mexican
agreed that if they were to be the inborder. Morgan’s students were readstruments of their learning, they were
ing Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in
to be partly responsible for determinKing Arthur’s Court. In the exchange,
ing their grades for the first quarter.
my history students would discuss the
They would base their decision on the
history of the Middle Ages with the
Arizona Six Trait Rubric for writing,
students in Rio Rico, and Morgan’s
on group evaluation of their work, and
students would discuss the literature
on my input.
they were reading. My second goal
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
Now that they accepted the challenge to change, how was I to prepare
them? In the first classes, I introduced
them to the ideas of Paolo Freire and
his notion that education should be
intrinsically motivated and rest in the
hands of the learner. I explained that
knowledge should focus on the self in
society and move towards change of
the status quo. Our classroom became
a mini-revolution in learning, though
this learning experience had its own
share of pain.
For the first time in my teaching
career, the students were more interested in questions than in answers,
and they came to me for resources,
not for answers. The classroom dynamics changed, too. Students were
up and about in the classroom asking
other groups, “What do you think?”
and “What are you writing?” As they
asked their questions, they moved
from group to group—collecting food
for thought (as well as candy, chips
and something to drink). I monitored
their work and became convinced that
even in the midst of all this noisy activity, they were on task.
Their writing exchange with Rio
Rico kept them on task and challenged them to think outside the box.
In small groups, they worked hard,
writing responses to challenge the Rio
Rico students. The responses taken
from their evaluation of the exchange
revealed that some self-reflection had
taken place: “We all know that the
things we say and even the way we
act around authority figures, such as
our teachers, are completely different
from the way we act around our peers.
Some of our most brilliant thoughts
form when communicating with our
own age group.”
The exchange with Rio Rico also
challenged my students’ abilities to
write. Afterward, they reported, “The
exchange has helped us find a new
way of writing that we thought was
impossible. When we wrote to the
students of Rio Rico, we wrote absolutely differently from what we would
usually have written for our teachers.
We were familiar and comfortable
with the way we wrote.” These stu-
dents painstakingly worked on their
drafts to insure that their message was
clear to the audience in Rio Rico. The
thesaurus was frequently consulted as
they searched for the right word,
achieving clarity in their writing.
In their study of Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
Court, my students demonstrated an
understanding of Freire’s belief that
the learner is responsible for his or
her own learning. My students determined categories of research related
to life during the Middle Ages. They
established deadlines, reserved time in
the library, and decided how each
group would evaluate the research
work. There were times when they
relaxed in class, but their work was
always done on time. Giving up control proved difficult for me, however,
and at times I exerted my authority,
but they told me, “You said we were
responsible for our learning and our
grades. We’ll get the job done.”
Using Twain’s classic as a bridge
to the Middle Ages engaged my students in their understanding of another historical period. They met the
challenge and told me in evaluations,
“The literature allowed us to visualize
the setting of the time. In Twain’s
classic we saw how people at that
time acted and lived from day to day.
We not only had to look at the historical events and people but at the literature as well.” Another group of students wrote, “Unlike a textbook, a
piece of literature serves as both historical facts and just fun reading. In
history textbooks, all that is provided
are facts and important people. A textbook shows us the surface of history,
not what is underneath.”
Had I achieved my goal of presenting history in a new way? Did my
students take ownership of their learning? My students responded: “We
find this new way of learning more
successful. Textbooks are lifeless and
often unchallenging because they are
a repetition of reading and answering
questions chapter after chapter. Using
literature as our ‘textbook’ stretches
us and helps us think more critically.”
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
They learned to read, write, and think
critically.
Using BreadNet to exchange our
writing with the Rio Rico students
gave my students a forum where their
voices were valued. Too often in the
past these voices were silenced by a
fear of disagreeing with their teacher
or their peers in class. The BreadNet
forum opened up possibilities: they
realized they had thoughts of value,
and they no longer had to parrot back
mere facts.
Did Freire’s methods help my students meet the Arizona standards? I
believe so; Freire is about exercising
freedom to learn, and my students had
the freedom to choose their reading,
to ask provocative questions, and to
formulate ideas and communicate
them in writing for an authentic audience, who also responded in writing.
These three departures from a textbook-based curriculum are woven
throughout the Arizona standards.
Seventeen of my twenty-two students
met the writing portion of the Arizona
standards. The five who did not meet
them were within striking distance.
While I was not teaching strictly to
meet the Arizona standards, this student-centered, student-directed approach to learning met with success in
its first attempt. In the study of history, if students know how to make
meaning, the facts will follow. ❦
Mary Lindenmeyer has
taught on the Navajo
Reservation for fourteen
years. She holds a
master’s degree in
history and plans to
complete a master’s in
English at Bread Loaf in
2003. Mary is department chair for history
and coordinator of the
Visions Program at
Window Rock High
School.
33
Teacher Network
Bridging the Gap with Communication
Technology
KRQE in Albuquerque. News 101
areas, and yet the term “rural” better
provides video production opportunities for high school classes in the
Southwest. Locally, our program is
Lou McCall
sponsored by the DWI (Driving While
Central High School
Intoxicated) Task Force of McKinley
County. To start the program for the
Gallup NM
1998-99 school year, this agency
granted the school approximately
allup, New Mexico, is a tough
$30,000 to buy equipment, with the
little place characterized by
stipulation that the class produce pubpuzzling dichotomies. Its
lic service announcements (PSAs) for
population, not much over 20,000,
the prevention of substance abuse.
swells on some days to 100,000
As the instructor of video producpeople, in their cars, in stores, or just
tion, communications, and language
stopping for gas. A commercial mecca
arts at Central High School, I was eafor many of the surrounding Indian
ger for my students to seize this opreservations, Gallup is cut in half by Iportunity. One of my students’
40 (formerly Route 66), one of the
projects, a four-minute teen drama on
busiest freeways in the U.S. Other
whether cigarettes are cool, was
traffic enters from another busy north/
awarded second place in an antismoksouth route. It’s this juncture that
ing contest called “The Truth Unfilgives Gallup its Navajo name, “the
tered,” part of the International Stuplace where there is a bridge,” a dedent MTV Awards. A class visit to a
scription perhaps more metaphorical
radio station produced a thirty-second
than anyone realizes.
radio PSA against smoking, which
When I moved to Gallup I had no
won third place in the audio category
idea that technology would enable me
of the same contest. The successful
to construct a bridge for my students,
completion of their video projects—
allowing them to leave disillusionment
and their winning awards—helped to
behind and move forward to successtransform the News 101 students. Unful educational experiences. When I
like other schools
applied for a job
we do not offer
teaching in the pubextracurricular
lic schools, some
activities, and we
cynics warned me
have no sports
that I would be enprogram. With a
tering a Third
taste of success
World country.
through the News
Prior to coming to
101 program, stuGallup, I had never
dents, some of
taught in a public
whom felt like
school system. The
outsiders or misfact that technically
fits in the tradiI wasn’t certified
tional public
didn’t seem to
school, were ready
bother anyone.
for more.
Teachers come and
I was not surgo, and our personprised at how the
nel office is a very
students responded
busy place. Gallup
to using technolhas many of the
Lou McCall (kneeling, center) with students
ogy. Some had
same social probfrom Central High School’s video production class
little interest in
lems as larger urban
G
34
describes the area. Nowhere are the
ramifications of these dichotomies
more keenly felt than in Gallup’s public schools.
The variety of languages and cultures represented by Gallup students
presents some truly daunting challenges to educators. Most students are
Native American (the majority are
Navajo) or Hispanic. Many have not
grown up using English as their first
language; some live without running
water or electricity. Concern for education sometimes does not seem to be
a priority for those struggling to survive.
A small alternative school for “the
problem kids,” Central High School
was formerly considered a dumping
ground for discipline problems. Recently, though, the school’s reputation
has improved in the educational community. Our state evaluation agency
suggested our school be the model
school for the district. Other alternative schools have sprouted in the area,
partially due to the success of Central
High.
One of our successful programs is
News 101, created by CBS affiliate
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
academics but lit up like light bulbs
when they plugged into anything electronic. After years of being a grind,
school was now fun, challenging, and
social, and the curricular content that
addressed risky behavior made sense
in the context of their lives. Every
time we acquired new equipment,
such as a camera or scanner, the students forgot that they didn’t like to
The subjects the
students were
researching were
innovative and
effective for reaching
youth who hadn’t
been successful in
traditional
educational settings.
read and solved problems by consulting the user’s manual. Many of my
students did not have the communication skills to take a phone message or
make a polite business call. Yet by
contacting technical support and setting up interviews with local business
people, they improved these skills,
developed a sense of competence, and
felt less alienated from the education
system. I have seen them blossom tremendously with the use of the Internet
and video cameras.
One outcome of the success of our
News 101 program is that we started a
journalism class. Our school newspaper, The Fast Times, is a sixteen-page,
color tabloid that addresses some
thorny social issues, not what most
people would expect from a high
school publication.
This year our newspaper class of
Navajo, Zuni, and Hispanic students
is working with Mike Mayo’s middle
school journalism class in the Boston
area, using BreadNet to conduct a
writing exchange. The project is
called “From Rez to Red Line,” and
the journalism students from each of
the schools will be contributing as
correspondents to the newspaper at
the other school. The schools have
remarkable similarities and differences. Many of the urban students
come from other countries, are economically disadvantaged, and are
learning English. Many students in
Gallup, near the Reservation, experience similar problems in a rural environment.
The skills I found myself teaching
and the subjects the students were researching (healthy versus risky behaviors) were innovative and effective for
reaching youth who hadn’t been successful in traditional educational settings. The language and context of
American textbooks were like foreign
turf to them; I found our school’s alternative program very effective for
drawing out unhappy teens. The
hands-on, gratifying process of producing a product, such as a video or a
newspaper, was a viable way for them
to learn communication skills. At the
same time, they were internalizing the
lessons about making smart, healthy
choices.
H
owever, as a new teacher, I
knew there was something
missing. As time went by I
realized that the success my students
had was entirely fortuitous. I did not
know anything about strategies, assessments, standards, or benchmarks.
I was busy as a new teacher getting
through each day and loving it, hoping students were learning important
lessons. When required to produce
curriculum maps for my classes to
illustrate how I was integrating standards-based learning, I froze. The jargon of standards seemed written in
code. In the summer of 2000, a newer,
less complex set of standards was
adopted by the New Mexico Board of
Education. This set was far less intimidating than its predecessor. Prefacing the standards were ten guiding
principles about learning and teaching
which underlie all the content standards and offer good advice for any
teacher. They were comprehensive
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
and much easier to understand. I
started to crack the code.
My own classes, with which I was
still experimenting, provided vital opportunities to think about standards,
or possibly even exceed them. One of
the language arts content standards
says simply, “Students will use literature and media to develop an understanding of people, societies and the
self.” That works. When my journalism students correspond with students
in Boston and submit articles to their
newspaper, they are indeed using
high-tech media to explore other
peoples and other societies. In the
process, they learn much about themselves. And my video students who
produce PSAs to prevent substance
abuse are applying “grammatical,
metaphorical, or rhetorical devices to
inform and persuade others,” another
performance standard.
In all schools, where every teacher
builds a bridge, I see that integrating
standards-based education is invaluable. I am now at the point where I
appreciate the standards as a guide to
drive my curriculum. I’m not teaching
from a “cookbook” that someone else
wrote, but I’m finding ways to make
connections between my methods and
the standards. From there it is a small
step to write lesson plans that teach to
the assessment. ❦
Lou McCall earned a
bachelor’s degree in fine
arts in filmmaking from
the Art Institute of Chicago in 1985 and is
currently working on a
master’s in teaching at
Western New Mexico
University. She recently
completed her first summer in the Bread Loaf
program at the New
Mexico campus. Her
interests include painting
and poetry.
35
Teacher Network
Aligning Electronic Exchanges with
Standards: An Interview with Gail Denton
Editorial Note: Gail Denton’s students enjoy a variety of electronic
writing exchanges, including partnerships with other middle school students, university students, preservice
teachers, and volunteer adults in her
home community. At the 2001 Conference of the South Carolina Council of
Teachers of English, I interviewed
Gail concerning her use of electronic
exchanges in the middle school curriculum.
Chris Benson
BLTN Editor
Bread Loaf School of English
CHRIS: Can you describe the structure and parameters of an exchange?
GAIL: They vary widely. I have had
all my students involved in exchanges
before, up to one hundred that is, and
that’s probably too many. I have done
exchanges linking students across the
curriculum and across grades. Last
year I set up an exchange between an
eighth grade class and a sixth grade
class. I like to set up exchanges that
last for twelve weeks, but I know
teachers who have had exchanges for
the entire school year. It depends on
what you are looking for. The twelveweek exchange seems to be the minimum amount of time needed to allow
exchange partners to form enough
trust to respond to written work and to
accept the responses constructively. It
takes a while to develop such a relationship. In a twelve-week exchange,
the students exchange about ten responses. It’s a sustained and focused
project.
CHRIS: Do you always use literature
as the focus of the writing in the exchange?
36
GAIL: Not always. I have designed
writing exchanges between my
middle school students and university
students who are preservice teachers.
In that case, the purpose of the exchange was to provide information to
preservice teachers and to allow them
to get to know a student. For my students, of course, the exchange provided an audience for their writing.
And my students were encouraged to
think critically about their education
and their goals. They asked, for example, “What courses did you take in
high school?” or “How are classes in
college different from the classes you
had in high school?” or “Here’s the
career I’m thinking about. Do you
have any suggestions about courses I
should take?” Even though my students are four years away from college, they’re very interested in the
answers to those questions.
CHRIS: Do you have specific writing
prompts each week for your students,
or do you allow them to write whatever is on their minds?
GAIL: My first exchange was openended, and my eighth graders and
even most of the university students
had difficulty with that aspect. The
students talked about The Titanic the
first week, and they talked about it the
second week, and they talked about it
the third week. We seemed to be
stuck, and the correspondence got
shorter and shorter. Students eventually lost interest in the project because
the purpose for the communication
was missing. So, I began giving extended writing prompts, which provide the structure that the students
need initially. I ask the students to
respond to a topic by writing two
paragraphs, but they are free to write
more, and as the exchange goes forward, the students voluntarily begin to
write about other things. I also allow
“free” responses periodically so they
can write about anything they want to.
Students are always being made to
write on topics chosen by their
teacher, and students tire of a steady
diet of assigned topics, which is why
so many students don’t like to write.
So I try to give them a blend: writing
prompts for structure when they need
it and freedom to write on topics of
their own choice because they need
that too.
CHRIS: Do you think it helps if you
know the teacher on the other end of
the exchange beforehand?
GAIL: Yes, I do. If you personally
know your colleague on the other end
of the exchange, you know a lot about
his or her methods and philosophy
and whether you will have compatible
activities in the project; otherwise,
you will have to figure that out in the
process of doing the exchange. So
knowing your colleague on the other
end saves time. I’m not saying that
Gail Denton at the 2001 Conference
of the South Carolina Council
of Teachers of English
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
you can’t do a successful exchange
without knowing the other teacher
personally, but I think the likelihood
of having a successful exchange is
increased if you do. I have dozens of
students involved in exchanges right
now, and at some point something
will go wrong—it always does. And
we have to be willing to adjust, regroup, and go forward. Sometimes
that flexibility is difficult to achieve if
you don’t know the person. I’ve seen
it from both sides, and I think that
knowing the person is helpful.
CHRIS: How do exchanges figure in
the standards movement? Is it hard to
justify an exchange in the curriculum?
GAIL: I think one reason teachers are
intimidated by the standards is that
they think curriculum standards are
something new, something extra.
They aren’t really new. Good teachers
have always had goals and objectives,
which are linked to class activities,
and those activities are linked to assessment of students’ work. The email
exchange is just another classroom
activity that is linked to goals and objectives. There has been more emphasis on standards lately. I've looked at
previous exchanges to determine their
alignment with standards. In each
project, exchange activities support
more than forty percent of the primary
curriculum standards. If the curriculum standards are used in planning an
exchange, however, the percentage
can climb to more than eighty percent,
and standards can help the teacher
plan a more well-rounded language
arts program for the students. I don’t
sit down with the standards and think
of an activity for each one. But I refer
to them periodically to make sure I
am giving my students all I can, and,
ultimately, that step enriches the program. Referring to the standards as a
guide prompts me to think more creatively about email exchanges as a
learning activity. It also helps me see
what I may be inadvertently omitting
from the curriculum. I don’t think that
all classroom instruction has to be
aligned with the standards, however.
We have to give some decision-mak-
ing rights to the teacher because the
teacher knows the particular student
in a particular environment at a particular time—and that may not need
to be dictated by a standard. For example, in the last year I have been
trying to work out how to use a voice
recognition computer program so that
students who are extremely deficient
in the language arts area can be included in more of the class activities.
Well, I don’t see anything specific
about using a voice recognition program in the standards, but does that
mean I shouldn’t use it? Of course
not. I use the standards as a guide in
designing a more complete course
of language arts for the year, but the
students’ needs must always be the
primary consideration.
CHRIS: Which standards are addressed in the process of doing an
exchange?
GAIL: The most obvious area is in
writing. The whole writing process
can be covered with an exchange. Students compose a draft and then go to
the computer lab to revise, type, and
email their messages. When their
partners respond, they will respond in
turn, so they are practicing reading
comprehension in the process. Also
an exchange is a form of publishing
the students’ work, and that is recommended in the standards. You really
get everything in the writing process
through an exchange.
CHRIS: What about literature?
GAIL: Let’s say, for example, in class
we discuss a character’s motivation.
And maybe we do this in small groups
in the classroom, but that could be
done just as well with an exchange
partner on line. If we do it on line in
an exchange forum, we are getting the
literature analysis, and we are hitting
some of the technology standards, too.
We are also reaching an audience beyond the classroom, and I think that’s
extremely important. My students are
very interested in what students beyond our school are thinking. They
are very interested in knowing what
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
activities those other students are doing at their schools, and what they
think about the literature.
CHRIS: Does the exchange slow
down the study of literature or the
practice of writing?
GAIL: It does slow it down, which
can be a disadvantage: if my class
goes to the computer lab this week to
post messages, and our exchange partners go next week, then two weeks
can pass between the correspondence.
And if we’re covering a novel in three
weeks, perhaps the correspondence
isn’t quite as meaningful. So I like for
the exchanges to occur more frequently. The answer is obvious: we
need more computers that are accessible more frequently. I’d like to explore the possibility of obtaining
grants to purchase keyboarding
notepads or laptops that students can
use in the classroom on a regular basis because scheduling time in a computer lab is difficult. I want my students to have frequent written exchanges, with clear purpose, and with
audiences beyond our classroom. ❦
Gail Denton is an eighth
grade language arts
teacher at Riverside
Middle School in Greer,
South Carolina. A
graduate of Furman
University with a
bachelor’s degree in
English and a master’s in
education, Gail has
taught in Greenville
County for fourteen
years. She regularly
publishes articles on
classroom research and
recently became codirector of the Upstate
Writing Project.
37
Teacher Network
BLTN State Meeting Reports
Alaska
The most exciting Alaskan news is
that BLTN Fellow Pat Truman has
been named Alaska’s Teacher of the
Year (see article on page 17). The entire BLTN network extends its congratulations to Pat.
The most important issue in the
state is the Alaska High School Qualifying Exam, which is in its second
year of implementation. At state
meetings and on line, Bread Loafers
are discussing issues relating to the
release of the first results of the test.
Alaska Bread Loafers were active in
the test committees that convened
during summer 2000. Student scores
were particularly low in writing and
math. Talk is already being generated
at the state level concerning the implications of the test and the possibility
of postponing it as a requirement for
graduation in 2002.
Alaska Bread Loafers are awaiting
the publication of Standard Implications, a book about best practices including fourteen narratives by Bread
Loafers. Work began on the project
under the guidance of Scott Christian
at a writers’ conference in February,
2000. Annie Calkins and Scott edited
the book and it is being printed currently. Another writing conference for
Bread Loafers is planned for February
22-25, 2001, with hopes of producing
another collection of edited narratives
and essays on educational topics.
Scott Christian is currently working on a grant project focused on preparing indigenous teachers. JoAnn
Ross Cunningham and Pauline Evon
are mentor teachers in the project.
Linda Volkman, Pat Truman, and
Sondra Porter teamed to create a class
on teaching writing and meeting state
standards. Linda and Sondra are currently teaching the course in the MatSu District.
The annual Alaska Literacy/Reading Conference was held in mid-October in Juneau, and Bread Loafers were
38
present in abundance at every presentation. Most of the group met for dinner at the Fiddlehead Restaurant after
the conference to plan an audio or
face-to-face meeting in the spring.
Arizona
The Arizona BLTN fall meeting
was held in Sierra Vista, Arizona, on
September 23, 2000. It was hosted by
the Sierra Vista School District. Special guests were Dixie Goswami, Superintendent Renae Humburg of Sierra Vista, and Window Rock High
School student September Etsitty.
September and her teacher, Mary
Lindenmeyer, shared the experiences
gained during the Plato Exchange, a
telecommunications exchange between Morgan Falkner’s students in
Rio Rico and Mary’s in Fort Defiance. Dixie led discussions on the
changing face of BLTN, cultural aspects of an exchange, and assessment.
Renae Humburg shared her thoughts
on the growing role of superintendents and administrators in BLTN and
how they have supported BLTN
teachers. Ceci Lewis organized and
oversaw the Arizona English Teachers Association (AETA) Fall Conference on September 22 and 23 at Ft.
Huachuca. Many educators, including
Bread Loaf teachers and administrators from Arizona and New Mexico
attended. Dixie Goswami was the
keynote speaker. Juanita Lavadie, Susan Stropko, Renae Humburg, and
other Bread Loafers made presentations at the conference. Tombstone
High School student Seren Helday
and Window Rock High School student September Etsitty presented with
Dixie Goswami. Susan Miera, Joy
Rutter, Terry Kimball, Sylvia Saenz,
Mary Lindenmeyer, Vicki Hunt, and
Karen Humburg attended the conference.
Colorado
Colorado Bread Loafers met for
their fall meeting on September 30,
2000, in the western slope community
of Montrose, Colorado, where new
Fellows finally had the chance to
meet veterans. The first meeting of
the 2000-2001 school year included
seven new fellows, and energetic discussions ensued about “best practices” in language arts classrooms.
Colorado Fellows shared plans for
electronic writing exchanges held in
the fall and discussed using page-tostage classroom activities to enrich
the study of literature. Tentative plans
were made to convene in Denver with
students for a drama workshop. Enlisting the assistance of the Bread
Loaf ensemble and other professional
troupes interested in working with
schools was discussed.
Discussion of uniting the BLTN
Fellows of Colorado led to plans for a
statewide BLTN exchange to address
a component of the Colorado Student
Assessment Program test, which all
Colorado students take in February.
Students involved in the exchange
will pick their best five pieces of writing and share why they chose them.
The highlight of the meeting was
an engaging presentation by Lucille
Rossbach and her students Terri and
Dan who presented their work in the
Pass the Poetry exchange, a writing
exchange including Tammy Van
Wyhe, her students, and Chris
Benson.
Plans were made to prepare a
Bread Loaf/Colorado presentation at
the Colorado Language Arts conference in Colorado Springs on March 810. A group of Fellows will present
the effects of Bread Loaf classes on
their teaching, the uses of BreadNet,
and the impact of classroom exchanges on students’ abilities in reading and writing.
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
Georgia
The Georgia fall BLTN meeting
was held December 1, 2000, at Unicoi
State Park in Helen, during the weekend of the Georgia Conference of English Teachers. The following were
present: Dixie Goswami, Chris
Benson, Judy Kirkland, Carolyn
Coleman, Julie Rucker, Rosetta
Coyne, Terri Washer, and Cathy
Magrin.
Discussion centered on the possibility of attending the national BLTN
meeting in Santa Fe in May. Several
Fellows expressed interest in attending meetings with the South Carolina
BLTN group in the spring.
Carolyn Benson assembled a
Georgia report that includes Georgia
Fellows’ exchange proposals and contact information. The report was distributed at the meeting.
Each member summarized
progress with writing exchanges
planned for this year. Rosetta Coyne
reported she had won the Woman of
Achievement Award in Valdosta, and
she was invited to speak at the Georgia Teacher of the Year program in
May to highlight her work at Bread
Loaf. Julie Rucker reported that she
will be the conference director for the
Georgia Council of Teachers of English (GCTE) meeting. Alan Perry of
GCTE attended the meeting to discuss
additional program proposals for the
February conference. After the meeting, Terri Washer, Julie Rucker, and
others worked with Chris Benson on a
proposal to NCTE.
Kentucky
Kentucky Bread Loafers met October 21, 2000, in Louisville with
members of the Department of Education and Dixie Goswami as guests.
Funding for 2001 for Bread Loaf Fellows was a key item of discussion at
the meeting. Starr Lewis from Kentucky Department of Education spoke
about the roles she sees Fellows assuming, as regional writing consultants, as cluster leaders, and in con-
junction with the various Writing
Project affiliates in Kentucky. Fellows reported on the progress of their
various exchanges and had time to
discuss successes, setbacks, and possible new directions.
Tim Miller and Joan Haigh were
invited to attend the state Writing Program Advisory Board Meeting held
on November 6, 2000, to thank the
board for its support of Bread Loaf
Fellows and to present information on
professional development opportunities available through Bread Loaf.
The importance of the collegial nature
of the summer programs, the network
of contacts made there, and the ongoing exchanges were part of the morning discussion.
In December at the conference
“All Children Can Learn,” Kentucky
teachers reviewed how education reform has changed Kentucky schools;
Starr Lewis was a panelist at this conference and several Bread Loaf Fellows attended. On February 9 and 10,
2001, the Kentucky Council of Teachers of English conference was held in
Louisville, and Bread Loaf Fellows
presented a panel discussion about
using technology to set up effective
student writing exchanges with real
audiences. Kentucky Bread Loaf Fellows held their spring state meeting
during that weekend.
Mississippi
Mississippi Bread Loafers are involved in exciting projects. Renee
Moore is active in a conference on
line about the advantages and disadvantages of separating English
courses for advanced and gifted students. Renee was also invited to participate in the teacher research project
administered by Bob Fecho at the
University of Georgia; in addition
Renee is working on a chapter to be
included in a book edited by Chris
Benson, Bette Davis, and Karen
Mitchell. Peggy Turner has worked
with Susan Miera (NM) on The Crucible and is now doing a Huck Finn
exchange with Julie Rucker (GA) and
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
Susan. Her students also responded to
short stories by students in Joann
Ross Cunningham’s classes in Alaska.
Patricia Parrish’s students continued
their involvement in “Going Wild,” a
nature writing exchange, with Sylvia
Saenz’s students in Arizona. Mississippi BLTN members plan to meet in
March with Dixie Goswami and others to develop funding strategies to
bring more Mississippi teachers to
Bread Loaf.
New Mexico
New Mexico members of the
BLTN held their fall meeting in Taos
on October 28, 2000, with twentyone members present. Bread Loaf Director Jim Maddox attended and presented plans for moving the New
Mexico Bread Loaf campus to the Institute of American Indian Arts in
Santa Fe. Other presentations at the
meeting ranged from portfolio assessment of student writing, to online
technical problems, to New Mexico’s
movement toward exit examinations,
to the New Mexico Council of Teachers of English. A highlight of the
meeting was the presentation by
Bread Loafer Dan Marano who encouraged everyone to attend the Taos
Film Festival in the spring. Members
overwhelmingly voted to hold the
spring meeting in conjunction with
the Bread Loaf Annual Conference in
Santa Fe in May, 2001.
State BLTN moderator Dan
Furlow urged all New Mexico Fellows to contact their representatives
concerning the legislature’s educational agenda, including the public
school budget and teacher pay increases. All New Mexico Fellows
were encouraged to use the “New
Mexico Politics” folder within the
state conference folder, on BreadNet,
to keep each other informed of this
year’s political negotiations in Santa
Fe.
(continued on next page)
39
Teacher Network
BLTN State
Meeting Reports
(continued from previous page)
Ohio
Ohio members of the Bread Loaf
Teacher Network met at South High
School in Columbus on Saturday, October 28, for their fall meeting. Attendance was wonderful with only six
members unable to attend. Scott
Christian, Dixie Goswami, and Chris
Benson attended the meeting and with
Eva Howard visited several Fellows’
schools on the two days prior to the
meeting: Elizabeth Bruner in Dayton,
Elizabeth Nelson in Springfield,
Cynthia Boutte in Akron and Cynthia
Rucker in Zanesville. Dan Good of
the Ohio Department of Education
attended the meeting as well.
The Ohio Fellows reported at the
Saturday meeting that they were enthusiastically participating in writing
exchanges on line within the state of
Ohio as well as with other BLTN
members in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, New
Mexico, South Carolina, Vermont,
and one with a teacher on sabbatical
in Greece.
Plans for a spring meeting are underway. This meeting will include
students showcasing their work for
members of the network and other
interested people at the state department. Another item on the spring
agenda is to develop strategies to begin to address in writing issues related
to Ohio’s state standards. Visits by
BLTN staff to the schools of other
members of the Ohio-Rise Fellows
will complement the meeting.
South Carolina
The South Carolina fall meeting of
the BLTN was held at Waccamaw
High School in Pawleys Island, October 13–14. Important issues discussed
included the announcement from the
40
South Carolina Department of Education that $5,000 fellowships will be
offered for three teachers who wish to
attend BLSE during the summer of
2001 as well as $2,500 to returning
Fellows. The returning Fellows will
also be aided by matching funds from
BLSE with a supplement from Write
to Change.
Another important agenda item
was the discussion of an outreach
strategy within the state to bring
teachers to day-long workshops in
writing and technology, as well as a
week-long workshop for credit for the
inclusion of additional teachers interested in learning techniques for online
conferencing. Plans were discussed
for involving the BLTN Fellows in
collaboration with other state organizations, such as South Carolina Council of Teachers of English (SCCTE),
to strengthen “teacher voice” in educational issues.
The South Carolina Fellows met
again on Friday, January 20, 2001, at
the annual meeting of the SCCTE to
discuss recruiting teachers to apply
for Bread Loaf fellowships. Middle
school teachers were especially encouraged to apply. They also planned
the final meeting of the school year,
which will take place on April 21,
2001, at Northwest Middle School in
Travelers Rest, and will include presentations by South Carolina students.
Vermont
The Vermont BLTN Fellows met
in November in Middlebury at St.
Mary’s School. Several important issues were on the agenda. The first
was a discussion of strategies for approaching Vermont’s Department of
Education for funding to bring teachers to Bread Loaf and to provide professional development for teachers. A
second item on the agenda was initiating outreach efforts by the Vermont
BLTN group to bilingual schools in
Lawrence, Massachusetts. The group
also expressed interest in planning a
visit to the school founded by Nancie
Atwell in Maine. Finally, the group
discussed pros and cons of in-service
and professional development practices at Vermont schools.
Governor Howard Dean and Education Commissioner David Wolk
have made a commitment to teacher
training and professional development, and the Vermont BLTN group
took initial steps to take a leadership
role in the state’s initiatives, especially those involving teacher-research and integrating technology into
the language arts curriculum.
The annual spring
meeting of the Bread
Loaf Teacher Network
will be held at the
Radisson Santa Fe, in
Santa Fe, New Mexico,
Friday through Sunday,
May 4-6, 2001. Over
sixty Fellows from all
parts of the Network
and the U.S. will attend
the three-day event.
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
BLTN Moderators for 2000-2001
Alaska—Sondra Porter, University of Alaska Southeast, Sitka AK
Arizona—Karen Humburg, Tombstone High School, Tombstone AZ
Colorado—Maria Roberts, Peetz Plateau School, Peetz CO
Georgia—Harlem Middle School, Harlem GA
Kentucky—Joan Haigh, Danville High School, Danville KY
Mississippi—Patricia Parrish, Sumrall Attendance Center, Sumrall MS
New Mexico—Dan Furlow, Clayton High School, Clayton NM
Ohio—Eva Howard, Preble Shawnee Middle School, Camden OH
Jason Leclaire, Bradford High School, Bradford OH
South Carolina—Ginny DuBose, Waccamaw High School, Pawleys Island SC
Vermont—Douglass Boardman, Lamoille Union High School, Hyde Park VT
Coordinator of Moderators—Karen Mitchell, University of Alaska Southeast,
Juneau AK
Co-directors of Bread Loaf City Teacher Network—Lou Bernieri, Phillips Academy, Andover MA; and Hazel Lockett, Clifford J. Scott High School, East
Orange NJ
Curriculum Standards Available On Line
Readers interested in the curriculum standards of the ten target states of the BLTN may find them and related material
through links on the Web sites listed below.
Alaska: http://www.eed.state.ak.us/qschools/standards.html
Arizona: http://www.ade.state.az.us/standards/contentstandards.htm
Colorado: http://www.cde.state.co.us/index_stnd.htm
Georgia: http://www.glc.k12.ga.us/qstd-int/homepg.htm
Kentucky: http://www.kde.state.ky.us/oapd/curric/Publications/Transformations/trans.html
Mississippi: http://www.mde.k12.ms.us/curriculum/
New Mexico: http://sde.state.nm.us/divisions/learningservices/schoolprogram/standards/csnb.html
Ohio: http://www.ode.state.oh.us/ca/Ohio_standards.htm
South Carolina: http://www.state.sc.us/
Vermont: http://www.state.vt.us/educ/stand/page3.htm
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
41
Teacher Network
Announcements
On February 3, 2001, at the Oliver
School (a Bread Loaf Community
Writing and Publishing Center), in
Lawrence, MA, the Andover Bread
Loaf Lawrence Teacher Network in
collaboration with BLTN and the
Lawrence Public Schools offered a
professional development conference
for 125 teachers and administrators
from throughout the city. The conference, facilitated by ABL Director Lou
Bernieri, was titled “Inspiring Writing.” Beverly Moss was the keynote
speaker. Andover Bread Loaf and
BLTN guests included Dixie
Goswami, Jim Maddox, Hazel
Lockett, Robert Baroz, Traci
Saxton, and Mike Mayo.
Janet Atkins and Anne Shealy
presented “The Life around Us” at
SCCTE in Charleston, January, 2001.
Their presentation recounts a telecommunications exchange on the poetry
of Denise Levertov and Mary Oliver,
funded by NEH and Bread Loaf.
Dean Woodring Blase published
“A New Sort of Writing: E-Mail
in the E-nglish Classroom” in the
November 2000 issue of English
Journal.
Bread Loaf professor Bob Fecho
coordinated the University of
Georgia’s “Practitioner or Teacher
Researchers as Inquiring Travelers,”
funded by Arthur Vining Davis. The
grant supports inter-school visits
among over sixty-five teachers during
school year 2000-01. The following
Bread Loafers participate: Janet
Atkins, Chris Benson, Mary
Burnham, Kate Carroll, Scott
Christian, Bette Davis, Karen
42
Mitchell, Renee Moore, Marcella
Pixley, Rosie Roppel, and Ellen
Temple.
Gail Denton presented a session at
SCCTE in Charleston, January 20,
2001. She will present “Mystery and
Magic” at the NCTE conference in
Birmingham in March, an arts and
English integration project. Gail will
serve as co-director of the recently
chartered Upstate Writing Project for
South Carolina.
Mary Guerrero was named the
Lawrence, Massachusetts, Teacher of
the Year.
Eva Howard received the
Ashland Golden Apple Achiever
award in the summer of 2000. At the
National Board Certified Teacher
Meeting in Orlando in October, 2000,
she presented “A Slice of Bread Loaf:
Using Technology to Motivate Reluctant Middle School Students” and
“University Partnerships and National
Board Facilitation.”
Vicki Hunt was named Executive
Secretary of the Arizona English
Teachers’ Association.
Ceci Lewis was conference coordinator for the Arizona English
Teachers’ Association, which took
place on September 23, 2000, in Sierra Vista.
The Navajo Nation Rural System
Initiative awarded Mary Lindenmeyer a grant to travel with a team of
teachers from Window Rock High
School to visit Lincoln Park High
School in Chicago, Illinois, to explore
integrated interdisciplinary team
teaching. Mary also received a
Michael Jordan Grant to purchase
speakers, overhead projectors, a digital camera, a scanner, and other technical equipment.
On September 8, 2000, ten members of the Native Writers Group held
a public reading of short stories and
poetry at the Tuzzy Library in Barrow, Alaska. Mary Jane Litchard
coordinated the reading.
In fall of 2000, Patricia Parrish
was awarded National Board Certification in the area of Early Adolescence/English Language Arts. In
January, 2001, she received the Alan
R. Barton Excellence in Teaching
Award, given by Mississippi Power.
Tamarah Pfieffer was named to
the Executive Board of the Arizona
English Teachers Association as
Northern Arizona Director.
“What about Our Girls? Considering Gender Rules with Shabanu” was
published by Colleen Ruggieri in the
January, 2001, issue of English Journal. She presented “Chapbooks and
Change” at the 2000 fall conference
of the Ohio Council of Teachers of
English and Language Arts
(OCTELA). She has also been appointed to serve as the Secretary
OCTELA for the upcoming year.
Colleen was named as Ohio’s Outstanding High School Language Arts
Educator for 2000-2001 school year
by the Ohio Council of Teachers of
English Language Arts.
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
Anne Shealy received a $6,000
grant from the South Carolina Department of Education to improve reading
abilities of seventh grade students.
Molly Sherman received a $1,000
grant from the Fairbanks North Star
School District for “Stories Into
Sounds,” a series of student writing
projects that will be turned into radio
essays. Molly is teaching fifth grade
this year at Wood River Elementary
in Fairbanks.
Tammy Van Wyhe's article entitled “A Passion for Poetry: Breaking
Rules and Boundaries with Online
Relationships” appeared in the November 2000 issue of English Journal. The article details the first several months of a BreadNet exchange
involving students in Kenny Lake,
Alaska, and Idalia, Colorado. Chris
Benson served as online poet in residence.
Terri Washer presented “Internet
Exchanges: Real Classroom Exchanges” and “Can This Be Done in
the English Classroom?” at the November, 2000, NCTE Conference in
Milwaukee.
Special Announcements
The Greenville County School
District in South Carolina will provide fellowships of $5,000 for five
teachers to attend Bread Loaf in 2001,
beginning a three-year partnership
that will bring at least thirty teachers
to Bread Loaf. The partnership extends an existing network of South
Carolina teachers, many of whom are
funded by the South Carolina State
Department of Education. BLTN
staff and experienced members of the
network will offer workshops on
teaching with technology and demonstrations of BLTN partnerships and
exchanges to Greenville County
teachers.
BLSE received a generous research conference grant from the
Spencer Foundation to support studies
and publication on teacher research on
language and cultural diversity as a
positive resource in schools and com-
munities. In June 2000, at Bread
Loaf-Vermont, about seventy-five
teacher researchers and their mentors
met to report on their inquiries, to
form research teams and to develop
research aqendas around issues of
language and cultural diversity, especially as they are reflected in
BreadNet exchanges. A number of
teacher research conferences are in
progress on BreadNet; a group of
teacher researchers will meet March 1
at a special session preceding the
Penn Ethnography Forum to analyze
data they have collected so far. Research for Action will host the Bread
Loaf teacher research session in
Philadelphia, led by Eva Gold of RFA
and several members of the Bread
Loaf faculty and staff. Susan Lytle,
Diane Waff, Marty Rutherford, and
Judy Buchanan will join the group.
Inquiries will continue on BreadNet,
and the Bread Loaf teacher research-
ers will meet in May in Santa Fe or at
one of the four Bread Loaf campuses
during the summer of 2001. Electronic and print publications are
planned.
The Ohio Department of Education will continue a partnership begun
in 1999 by providing fellowships for
twenty-two Ohio teachers to study at
Bread Loaf in 2001. Ohio-Rise
teachers are increasingly visible as
resources in the state and throughout
the network.
Professional development and
classroom practice are designed with
Ohio standards and assessment in
mind: a major emphasis is on documenting benefits to teachers and students. A spring meeting to begin the
process of publishing Ohio-Rise
teachers’ narratives about their BLTN
work is being planned. ❦
Bread Loaf Fellows
Since 1993, the following teachers have received fellowships to study at the Bread Loaf School of English through generous support
from the Annenberg Rural Challenge, the DeWitt Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, the Educational Foundation of America, Middlebury
College, the Plan for Social Excellence, Inc., and the state departments of education of Alaska, Kentucky, Ohio, and South Carolina.
FELLOW
SCHOOL
SCHOOL ADDRESS
Schoenbar Middle School
Palmer High School
Benson Secondary School
217 Schoenbar Rd., Ketchikan AK 99901
1170 W. Arctic Ave., Palmer AK 99645
4515 Campbell Airstrip, Anchorage AK 99507
Alaska
Christa Bruce
Marilyn Bock
Rob Buck
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
43
Teacher Network
Patricia Carlson
Scott Christian
JoAnn Ross Cunningham
Shona DeVolld
Samantha Dunaway
Hugh C. Dyment
Pauline Evon
Patricia Finegan
Sue Hardin
Allison Holsten
M. Heidi Imhof
Fargo Kesey
David Koehn
Joe Koon
Danielle S. Lachance
Andrew Lesh
Mary Litchard
Susan McCauley
Geri McLeod
Sandra A. McCulloch
Ali Gray McKenna
Taylor McKenna
Rod Mehrtens
Norman Milks
Karen Mitchell
Natasha J. O’Brien
Maria Offer
Mary Olsen
Clare Patton
Prudence Plunkett
Sondra Porter
Karin C. Reyes
Mary L. Richards
Rosie Roppel
Dianna Saiz
Jill E. Showman
Sheri Skelton
Janet Tracy
Patricia A. Truman
Kathleen Trump
Tamara VanWyhe
Linda Volkman
Trevan Walker
Claudia Wallingford
Joanna L. Wassillie
44
Lathrop High School
University of Alaska-Southeast
Haines High School
Kenai Central High School
Nome Beltz High School
Bethel Alternative Boarding School
Kwethluk Community School
Schoenbar Middle School
Petersburg High School
(formerly of) Palmer High School
Nome Elementary School
Egegik School
(formerly of) Barrow High School
Bethel Regional High School
Hydaburg City Schools
(formerly of) Akiuk Memorial School
Ilisagvik College
Glacier View School
Glacier Valley Elementary School
Napaskiak Bia Elementary School
Juneau Douglas High School
Schoenbar Middle School
Matanuska-Susitna Borough Schools
Saint George School
University of Alaska Southeast
Ketchikan High School
Angoon School
Sand Point High School
Revilla High School
Colony High School
University of Alaska Mat-Su Campus
Juneau Douglas High School
Gruening Middle School
Ketchikan High School
Floyd Dryden Middle School
Voznesenka School
Shishmaref School
East Anchorage High School
Palmer Middle School
Susitna Valley Junior/Senior High School
Kenny Lake School
Colony Middle School
Ketchikan High School
(formerly of) Gruening Middle School
Tuluksak High School
901 Airport Way, Fairbanks AK 99701
Bill Ray Center, 1108 F St., Juneau AK 99801
P.O. Box 1289, Haines AK 99827
9583 Kenai Spur Hwy., Kenai AK 99611
P.O. Box 131, Nome AK 99762
P.O. Box 1858, Bethel AK 99559
Kwethluk AK 99621
217 Schoenbar Rd., Ketchikan AK 99901
Box 289, Petersburg AK 99833
1170 W. Arctic, Palmer AK 99645
P.O. Box 131, Nome AK 99762
General Delivery, Egegik AK 99579
P.O. Box 960, Barrow AK 99723
P.O. Box 1211, Bethel AK 99559
P.O. Box 109, Hydaburg AK 99922
Kasigluk AK 99609
P.O. Box 749, Barrow AK 99723
HC 03 Box 8454, Palmer AK 99645
10014 Crazy Horse Dr., Juneau AK 99801
General Delivery, Bethel AK 99559
10014 Crazy Horse Dr., Juneau AK 99801
217 Schoenbar Rd., Ketchikan AK 99901
125 W. Evergreen, Palmer AK 99645
1 School St., Saint George AK 99591
11120 Glacier Hwy., Juneau AK 99801
2610 Fourth Ave., Ketchikan AK 99901
P.O. Box 295, Angoon AK 99820
P.O. Box 269, Sand Point AK 99661
3131 Baranof Ave., Ketchikan AK 99901
125 W. Evergreen, Palmer AK 99645
Trunk Rd., Palmer AK 99645
10014 Crazy Horse Dr., Juneau AK 99801
9601 Lee St., Eagle River AK 99577
2610 Fourth Ave., Ketchikan AK 99901
10014 Crazy Horse Dr., Juneau AK 99801
P.O. Box 15336, Fritz Creek AK 99603
General Delivery, Shishmaref AK 99772
4025 E. Northern Lights, Anchorage AK 99508
1159 S. Chugach, Palmer AK 99645
P.O. Box 807, Talkeetna AK 99676
HC 60 Box 224, Copper Center AK 99573
HC 01 Box 6064, Palmer AK 99645
2610 Fourth Ave., Ketchikan AK 99901
9601 Lee Street, Eagle River AK 99577
Togiak AK 99678
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
Arizona
Priscilla Aydelott
Timothy Aydelott
Evelyn Begody
Sylvia Barlow
Sabra Beck
Kyril Calsoyas
Celia Concannon
Jason A. Crossett
Morgan Falkner
Christie Fredericks
Chad Graff
Karen Humburg
Amethyst Hinton Sainz
Vicki V. Hunt
Beverly Jacobs
Nancy Jennings
Rex Lee Jim
Terry D. Kimball
Cecelia Lewis
Mary Lindenmeyer
Jill Loveless
James Lujan
Paisley McGuire
Jody K. McNelis
Kevin T. McNulty
Janet Olson
Robin Pete
Tamarah Pfeiffer
Lois Rodgers
Joy Rutter
Sylvia Saenz
Stephen Schadler
Nan Talahongva
Judy Tarantino
Edward Tompkins
Risa Udall
Maria Winfield
Monument Valley High School
Monument Valley High School
Window Rock High School
Chinle Junior High School
Marana High School
Seba Dalkai School
Rio Rico High School
Flowing Wells High School
Rio Rico High School
Tuba City Public High School
(formerly of) Monument Valley High School
Tombstone High School
(formerly of) Catalina Foothills High School
Peoria High School
Marana High School
(formerly of) Ganado Intermediate School
Diné College
Patagonia High School
Tombstone High School
Window Rock High School
Globe Junior High School
Ganado Intermediate School
Patagonia High School
(formerly of) Santa Cruz Valley Union H. S.
(formerly of) Calabasas Middle School
(formerly of) Chinle Elementary School
Ganado High School
Ganado High School
Patagonia High School
Window Rock High School
Sierra Vista Middle School
Rio Rico High School
(formerly of) Hopi Junior/Senior High School
Ganado Intermediate School
Lake Havasu High School
St. Johns High School
Sierra Vista Middle School
P.O. Box 337, Kayenta AZ 86033
P.O. Box 337, Kayenta AZ 86033
P.O. Box 559, Fort Defiance AZ 86504
P.O. Box 587, Chinle AZ 86503
12000 Emigh Rd., Marana AZ 85653
HC 63 Box H, Winslow AZ 86047
1374 W. Frontage Rd., Rio Rico AZ 85648
3725 N. Flowing Wells Rd., Tucson AZ 85705
1374 W. Frontage Rd., Rio Rico AZ 85648
P.O. Box 67, Tuba City AZ 86045
P.O. Box 337, Kayenta AZ 86033
P.O. Box 1000, Tombstone AZ 85638
4300 E. Sunrise Dr., Tucson AZ 85718
11200 N. 83rd Ave., Peoria AZ 85345
12000 Emigh Rd., Marana AZ 85653
P.O. Box 1757, Ganado AZ 86505
Tsaile AZ 86556
P.O. Box 254, Patagonia AZ 85624
P.O. Box 1000, Tombstone AZ 85638-1000
P.O. Box 559, Fort Defiance AZ 86504
501 E. Ash St., Globe AZ 85501
P.O. Box 1757, Ganado AZ 86505
P.O. Box 254, Patagonia AZ 85624
9th and Main St., Eloy AZ 85231
220 Lito Galindo, Rio Rico AZ 85648
P.O. Box 587, Chinle AZ 86503
P.O. Box 1757, Ganado AZ 86505
P.O. Box 1757, Ganado AZ 86505
P.O. Box 254, Patagonia AZ 85624
P.O. Box 559, Fort Defiance AZ 86504
3535 E. Fry Blvd., Sierra Vista AZ 85635
1374 W. Frontage Rd., Rio Rico AZ 85648
P.O. Box 337, Keams Canyon AZ 86034
P.O. Box 1757, Ganado AZ 86505
2675 Palo Verde Blvd., Havasu City AZ 86403
P.O. Box 429, St. Johns AZ 85936
3535 E. Fry Blvd., Sierra Vista AZ 85635
Miami Yoder School District
Battle Rock Charter School
(formerly of) Battle Rock Charter School
(formerly of) Guffey Charter School
(formerly of) Ganado Middle School
(formerly of) Montrose High School
420 S. Rush Rd., Rush CO 80833
11247 Road G., Cortez CO 81321
11247 Road G., Cortez CO 81321
1459 Main St., Guffey CO 80820
6717 S. Boulder Rd., Boulder CO 80303
P.O. Box 10500, Montrose CO 81402
Colorado
Renee Evans
Stephen Hanson
Sonja Horoshko
Ginny Jaramillo
Mary Juzwik
John Kissingford
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
45
Teacher Network
Joanne Labosky
Douglas Larsen
Nancy Lawson
Joan Light
Melinda Merriam
Jimmie R. Phillips
Bonita L. Revelle
Maria Roberts
Lucille Rossbach
Sharilyn Smith
Heidi J. Walls
(formerly of) Lake George Charter School
Crestone Charter School
Montrose High School
Montrose High School
Delta High School
Cedaredge Middle School
Moffat County High School
Peetz Plateau School
Idalia High School
Cheraw High School
Durango High School
P.O. Box 420, Lake George CO 80827
P.O. Box 400, Crestone CO 81131
P.O. Box 10500, Montrose CO 81402
P.O. Box 10500, Montrose CO 81402
1400 Pioneer Rd., Delta CO 81416
360 N. Grand Mesa Dr., Cedaredge CO 81413
900 Finley Ln., Craig CO 81625
311 Coleman Ave., Peetz CO 80747
P.O. Box 40, Idalia CO 80735
P.O. Box 159, Cheraw CO 81030
2390 Main Ave., Durango CO 81301
West Laurens High School
Brooks County Middle School
Ware County Middle School
Harlem Middle School
Union County High School
Fitzgerald High School
Irwin County High School
Ware County Middle School
Crossroads Academy
338 Laurens School Rd, Dublin GA 31021
Quitman GA 31643
2301 Cherokee St., Waycross GA 31501
375 W. Forrest St., Harlem GA 30814
446 Wellborn St., Blairsville GA 30512
P.O. Box 389, Fitzgerald GA 31750
149 Chieftain Circle, Ocilla GA 31774
2301 Cherokee St., Waycross GA 31501
5996 Columbia Rd., Grovetown GA 30813
Sebastian Middle School
Nelson County High School
(formerly of) Washington County High School
Butler Traditional High School
Scott High School
Grayson County High School
Danville High School
Meade County High School
Worthington Elementary School
Hancock County High School
Fern Creek Traditional High School
Floyd County Schools
244 LBJ Rd., Jackson KY 41339
1070 Bloomfield Rd., Bardstown KY 40004
601 Lincoln Park Rd., Springfield KY 40069
2222 Crums Ln., Louisville KY 40216
5400 Taylor Mill Rd., Taylor Mill KY 41015
240 High School Rd., Leitchfield KY 42754
203 E. Lexington Ave., Danville KY 40422
938 Old State Rd., Brandenburg KY 40108
800 Center St., Worthington KY 41183
80 State Route 271 S., Lewisport KY 42351
9115 Fern Creek Rd., Louisville KY 40291
Prestonburg KY 41653
(formerly of) Ocean Springs High School
(formerly of) Shivers High School
Jones Junior High School
R. H. Watkins High School
Pascagoula High School
406 Holcomb Blvd., Ocean Springs MS 39564
P.O. Box 607, Aberdeen MS 38730
1125 N. 5th Ave., Laurel MS 39440
1100 W. 12th St., Laurel MS 39440
2903 Pascagoula St., Pascagoula MS 29567
Georgia
Carolyn Coleman
Rosetta Coyne
Jane Grizzle
Judith Kirkland
Catherine K. Magrin
Elizabeth McQuaig
Julie Rucker
K.C. Thornton
Terri Washer
Kentucky
Scott E. Allen
Joan M. Altman
Lea Banks
Sheryl M. Ederheimer
M. Patricia Fox
Alison Hackley
Joan Haigh
Laura Schmitt Miller
Timothy J. Miller
Peggy Dinwiddie Otto
Rebecca A. Slagle
Patricia Watson
Mississippi
Brad Busbee
William J. Clarke
Leslie Fortier
Carolyn Hardy
Myra Harris
46
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
William E. Kirby
Sharon Ladner
Judith Lawrence
Renee Moore
Terri Noonkester
Patricia Parrish
Patsy Pipkin
Peggy Turner
Penny Wallin
Hattiesburg High School
Gautier High School
Kemper County High School
Broad Street High School
(formerly of) Hawkins Junior High School
Sumrall Attendance Center
Oxford Junior High School
Saltillo High School
(formerly of) Jones Junior High School
301 Hutchinson Ave., Hattiesburg MS 39401
4307 Gautier Vancleave Rd., Gautier MS 39553
P.O. Box 429, Dekalb MS 39328
P.O. Box 149, Shelby MS 38774
523 Forrest St., Hattiesburg MS 39401
P.O. Box 187, Sumrall MS 39482
409 Washington Ave., Oxford MS 38655
Box 460, Saltillo MS 38866
1125 N. 5th Ave., Laurel MS 39440
(formerly of) Rio Rancho High School
Church Rock Elementary School
(formerly of) Deming Public Schools
Pecos Elementary School
Pojoaque High School
Gadsden High School
Pecos Elementary School
Pecos High School
(formerly of) Ojo Amarillo Elementary School
Memorial Middle School
(formerly of) Los Alamos High School
Newcomb Middle School
Clayton High School
Bernalillo High School
Mosquero Municipal Schools
Truth or Consequences Middle School
Pojoaque High School
(formerly of) Santa Teresa Middle School
Pojoaque High School
Shiprock High School
Gadsden Middle School
(formerly of) Yaxche School Learning Center
Native American Preparatory School
Tohatchi Middle School
Robertson High School
Twin Buttes High School
Gallup Central High School
Tse’Bit’ai Middle School
Bernalillo High School
(formerly of) Memorial Middle School
Pojoaque High School
(formerly of) Carlsbad High School
(formerly of) Laguna Middle School
Hot Springs High School
Lovington High School
Pojoaque High School
301 Loma Colorado, Rio Rancho NM 87124
43 Challenger Rd., Church Rock NM 87311
501 W. Florida, Deming NM 88030
P.O. Box 368, Pecos NM 87552
1574 State Rd. 502, Santa Fe NM 87501
6301 Hwy. 8, Anthony NM 88021
P.O. Box 368, Pecos NM 87552
P.O. Box 368, Pecos NM 87552
P.O. Box 768, Fruitland NM 87416
Old National Rd., Las Vegas NM 87701
300 Diamond Dr., Los Alamos NM 87544
P.O. Box 7973, Newcomb NM 87455
323 S. 5th St., Clayton NM 88415
P.O. Box 640, Bernalillo NM 87004
P.O. Box 258, Mosquero NM 87746
P.O. Box 952, Truth or Consequences NM 87901
1574 State Rd. 502, Santa Fe NM 87501
P.O. Box 778, Santa Teresa NM 88008
1574 State Rd. 502, Santa Fe NM 87501
P.O. Box 6003, Shiprock NM 87420
Rt. 1, Box 196, Anthony NM 88021
102 Padre Martinez Ln., Taos NM 87571
P.O. Box 260, Rowe NM 87526
P.O. Box 322, Tohatchi NM 07325
5th & Friedman Streets, Las Vegas NM 87701
P.O. Box 680, Zuni NM 87327
325 Marguerite St., Gallup NM 87301
P.O. Box 1873, Shiprock NM 87420
P.O. Box 640, Bernalillo NM 87004
947 Old National Rd., Las Vegas NM 87560
1574 State Rd. 502, Santa Fe NM 87501
408 N. Canyon, Carlsbad NM 88220
P.O. Box 268, Laguna NM 87026
P.O. Box 952, Truth or Consequences NM 87901
701 W. Ave. K, Lovington NM 88260
1574 State Rd. 502, Santa Fe NM 87501
New Mexico
Kim Bannigan
Anne Berlin
Wendy Beserra
Veronica C. Bowles
Jennifer K. Brandt
Erika Brett
Carol Ann Brickler
MaryBeth Britton
Dorothy I. Brooks
Lorraine Duran
Ann Eilert
Karen Foutz
Daniel Furlow
Emily Graeser
Janice Green
Annette Hardin
Diana Jaramillo
Susan Jesinsky
Glenda Jones
John Kelly
Roseanne Lara
Juanita Lavadie
Leslie Lopez
Jeffery M. Loxterman
Timothy Lucero
Carlotta Martza
Betty Lou McCall
Theresa Melton
Arlene Mestas
Alma Miera
Susan Miera
Gary Montaño
Deborah Morillo
Barbara Pearlman
Jane V. Pope
MacNair Randall
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
47
Teacher Network
Virginia Rawlojohn
Stan Renfro
Lisa K. Richardson
Chad C. Rucker
Zita Schlautmann
Norma Sheff
Philip Sittnick
Lauren Thomas Sittnick
Bruce R. Smith
Marilyn Trujillo
Helen N. Wintle
Michelle Wyman-Warren
Terry Wyrick
Estancia High School
Wingate High School
Alamo-Navajo Community School
Tohatchi High School
Bernalillo High School
Hatch Elementary School
Laguna Middle School
Laguna Middle School
Jemez Valley High School
Taos Day School
Wingate High School
Mountainair High School
Pojoaque High School
P.O. Box 68, Estancia NM 87016
P.O. Box 2, Fort Wingate NM 87316
Alamo NM 87825
P.O. Box 248, Tohatchi NM 87325
Box 640, Bernalillo NM 87004
Hatch NM 87937
P.O. Box 268, Laguna NM 87026
P.O. Box 268, Laguna NM 87026
8501 Highway 4, Jemez Pueblo NM 87024
P.O. Drawer X, Taos NM 87571
P.O. Box 2, Fort Wingate NM 87316
P.O. Box 456, Mountainair NM 87036
1574 State Rd. 502, Santa Fe NM 87501
Boardman High School
Indian Hill High School
Riedinger Middle School
Miami Valley School
Washington County Career Center
South Webster High School
Chagrin Falls High School
Purcell Marian High School
New Richmond Exempted Village Mid. Sch.
Preble Shawnee Middle School
Linden-McKinley High School
Bradford High School
Shawnee High School
Lakewood High School
Seven Hills Middle School
Maysville High School
Boardman High School
Solon High School
Ripley Union Lewis Huntington Jr./Sr. H. S.
South High School Urban Academy
Wooster High School
Mansfield Senior High School
Wooster High School
7777 Glenwood Ave., Youngstown OH 44512
6845 Drake Rd., Cincinnati OH 45243
77 W. Thornton St., Akron OH 44311
5151 Denise Dr., Daytona OH 45429
Rt 2, Marietta OH 45750
P.O. Box 100, South Webster OH 45682
400 E. Washington St., Chagrin Falls OH 44022
2935 Hackberry St., Cincinnati OH 45206
1135 New Richmond Rd., New Richmond OH 45157
5495 Somers Gratis Rd., Camden OH 45311
1320 Duxberry Ave., Columbus OH 43211
712 N. Miami Ave., Bradford OH 45308
1675 E. Possum Rd., Springfield OH 45502
4291 National Rd., Hebron OH 43025
5400 Red Bank Rd., Cincinnati OH 45227
2805 Pinkerton Rd., Zanesville OH 43701
7777 Glenwood Ave., Boardman OH 44512
33600 Inwood Dr., Solon OH 44139
1317 S. Second St., Ripley OH 45167
1160 Ann St., Columbus OH 43206
515 Oldman Rd., Wooster OH 44691
314 Cline Ave., Mansfield OH 44907
515 Oldman Rd., Wooster OH 44691
Northwest Middle School
Blue Ridge High School
Belton-Honea Path High School
Travelers Rest High School
Goose Creek High School
1606 Geer Highway, Travelers Rest SC 29690
2151 Fews Chapel Rd., Greer SC 29651
11000 Belton Hwy., Honea Path SC 29654
115 Wilhelm Winter St., Travelers Rest SC 29690
1137 Redbank Rd., Goose Creek SC 29445
Ohio
Vivian M. Axiotis
Dean Blase
Cynthia Boutte
Elizabeth Bruner
Joanna M. Childress
Judith Ellsesser
Anne Elrod
Jason Haap
Jamie Heffner
Eva Howard
Lorrie C. Jackson
Jason Leclaire
Elizabeth Nelson
Amanda O’Dell
Su Ready
Cynthia Rucker
Colleen Ruggieri
Bernard Safko
Michael Scanlan
Mickie Sebenoler
Jennifer Skowron
Sara Thorburn
Mandy G. Walden
South Carolina
Janet Atkins
Michael Atkins
Polly E. Brown
Victoria Chance
Raymond Cook
48
Bread Loaf School of English
Winter 2001
Diane M. Crenshaw
Gail R. Denton
Ginny DuBose
Monica M. Eaddy
Nona Edelson
Barbara Everson
Doris Ezell-Schmitz
Anne Gardner
Joyce Summerlin Glunt
Linda Hardin
Tracy Hathaway
Corinthea A. Jones
Priscilla E. Kelley
Nancy Lockhart
Robin Gibson
Carolyn Pierce
Anne Shealy
Betty Slesinger
Elizabeth V. Wright
Dixie High School
Box 158 1 Haynes St., Due West SC 29639
Riverside Middle School
615 Hammett Bridge Rd., Greer SC 29650
Waccamaw High School
2412 Kings River Rd., Pawleys Island SC 29585
(formerly of) Mayo High School
405 Chestnut St., Darlington SC 29532
(formerly of) Waccamaw High School
2412 Kings River Rd., Pawleys Island SC 29585
Belton-Honea Path High School
11000 Belton Hwy., Honea Path SC 29654
Chester Middle School
112 Caldwell St., Chester SC 29706
(formerly of) Georgetown High School
P.O. Box 1778, Georgetown SC 29442
(formerly of) Hunter-Kinard-Tyler High School
Box 158, Norway SC 29113
Beck Academy of Languages
302 McAlister Rd., Greenville SC 29607
(formerly of) Robert Smalls Middle School
43 Alston Rd., Beaufort SC 29902
Marlboro County High School
951 Fayetteville Ave., Bennettsville SC 29512
Pelion High School
P.O. Box 68, Pelion SC 29123
Homebound Tutor, Colleton School District
P.O. Box 290, Walterboro SC 29542
Calhoun Falls High School
Edgefield St., Calhoun Falls SC 29628
Cheraw High School
649 Chesterfield Hwy., Cheraw SC 29520
John Ford Middle School
P.O. Box 287, Saint Matthews SC 29135
(formerly of) Irmo Middle School
6051 Wescott Rd., Columbia SC 29212
Ronald E. McNair Junior High School
Carver St., Lake City SC 29560
Vermont
Cristie Arguin
Douglass Boardman
Kurt Broderson
Mary Burnham
Mary Ann Cadwallader
Suzannah L. Carr
Katharine Carroll
Moira Donovan
Jane Harvey
Ann Larkin
Margaret Lima
Suzane Locarno
Judith Morrison
Kathleen Otoka
Bill Rich
Emily Rinkema
Matthew C. Schlein
Gretchen Stahl
Ellen Temple
Vicki L. Wright
Carol Zuccaro
Northfield High School
Lamoille Union High School
Mt. Abraham Union High School
Waits River Valley School
(formerly of) Mill River Union High School
Waits River Valley School
Middlebury Union High School
Peoples Academy
Brattleboro Union High School
Orwell Village School
Canaan Memorial High School
Hazen Union School
Hinesburg Elementary/Middle School
Springfield High School
Colchester High School
Champlain Valley Union High School
Vergennes Union High School
Harwood Union High School
Camels Hump Middle School
Mt. Abraham Union High School
St. Johnsbury Academy
Middlebury College • Middlebury, Vermont
31 Vine, Northfield VT 05663
Rt. 15, Hyde Park VT 05455
9 Airport Dr., Bristol VT 05443
Rt. 25, East Corinth VT 05040
Middle Rd., North Clarendon VT 05773
Rt. 25, East Corinth VT 05040
Charles Ave., Middlebury VT 05753
202 Copely Ave., Morrisville VT 05661
50 Fairground Rd., Brattleboro VT 05301
Main St., Orwell VT 05760
1 School St., Canaan VT 05903
Main St., Hardwick VT 05843
Hinesburg VT 05461
303 South St., Springfield VT 05156
Laker Ln., Colchester VT 05446
CVU Rd., Hinesburg VT 05461
50 Monkton Rd., Vergennes VT 05491
RFD 1 Box 790, Moretown VT 05660
Brown Trace Rd., Richmond VT 05477
9 Airport Dr., Bristol VT 05443
1000 Main St., St. Johnsbury VT 05819
49
Winter 2001
Teacher Network
At Large
Jane Caldwell
Pamela Edwards
Jean Helmer
Christine Lorenzen
Michelle Montford
John Rugebregt
Peggy Schaedler
James Schmitz
Mohsin Tejani
Board of Cooperative Educational Services
Chaparral High School
Belle Fourche High School
Killingly Intermediate School
Kelly Middle School
Maria Carrillo High School
East Hampton Middle School
Kennedy Charter Public School
Aga Khan School
Dix Ave., Hudson Falls NY 12839
414 E Ojai Ave., Ojai CA 93023
1113 National St., Belle Fourche SD 57717
Upper Maple St., Dayville CT 06241
25 Mahan Dr., Norwich CT 06360
6975 Montecito Blvd., Santa Rosa CA 95409
19 Childs Rd., East Hampton CT 06424
P.O. Box 472527, Charlotte NC 28247
Aga Khan Rd., Kharadhar Karachi Pakistan
Urban Teacher Fellows
Gabri’lla Ballard
Emma Brock
Craig Ferguson
Richard Gorham
Mary Guerrero
Elizabeth Kimball
Michael Mayo
Shana Morrison
Erica Rogers
Thomara Speight
Robert Tiller
Julie Welch-Bucceri
50
Frederick Douglass Sr. High School
Anne Beers Elementary School
Newlon Elementary School
Lawrence High School
HK Oliver School
Arlington School
Nativity Preparatory School
Newlon Elementary School
Clifford J Scott High School
DC Scores
McMain Secondary School
Leonard School
3820 St. Claude Ave., New Orleans LA 70117
36 Alabama Ave. SE, Washington DC 20020
361 Vrain St., Denver CO 80219
233 Haverhill St., Lawrence MA 01840
183 Haverhill St., Lawrence MA 01841
150 Arlington St., Lawrence MA 01841
30 Raynor Circle, Roxbury MA 02120
361 Vrain St., Denver CO 80219
129 Renshaw Ave., East Orange NJ 07017
1612 U St. NW, Ste 405, Washington DC 20009
5712 S. Claiborne Ave., New Orleans LA 70125
60 Allen St., Lawrence MA 01840
Bread Loaf School of English